Changeling
Directed by Clint Eastwood. Rated: R. Universal Studios. Time: 2 hours, 21 minutes
Presbyterian crusader: John Malkovich plays 1920s minister and social activist Gustav Griebleg, with Angelina Jolie as Christine Collins, in Clint Eastwood’s Changeling. Learn more about the Presbyterian minister portrayed in this film. Award-winning director Clint Eastwood maintains his high standards in his newest release, Changeling, based on an almost unbelievable true story that riveted public attention in Los Angeles during the “Roaring Twenties.”
Christine Collins (Angelina Jolie) is a telephone supervisor who is raising her much-loved 9-year-old son Walter (Gattlin Griffith) alone because her estranged husband is in prison. One day in March 1928 she is called into work, forcing her to break a promise that she would take the boy to a movie. She leaves him alone in their modest bungalow, telling him not to go outside, but he’s gone when she returns. She calls the police, who unfeelingly tell her that there is nothing they can do until he has been missing for 24 hours.
For five months the anxious mother lives in limbo until the day when the officer in charge of the case, Capt. J.J. Jones (Jeffrey Donovan), calls to say that Walter has been found in Illinois. On the day he is to arrive at Union Station, Chief James E. Davis (Colm Feore) and the captain are on hand, along with a passel of eager reporters, summoned by the police so that they can garner some good publicity after so many reports of corruption and incompetence. Their golden moment is threatened when Christine’s joy turns to dismay; the boy claiming to be Walter is not her son. The flustered Capt. Jones, keeping the reporters at a distance, tells her that she is distraught and confused. “Try him out for a couple of weeks,” he tells her. She complies, but this boy is much shorter than Walter, and, unlike her son, he has been circumcised.
Mrs. Collins points out the discrepancies — is even backed by Walter’s teacher — but the police refuse to believe her. She pleads with them to resume the search for her son. To avoid bad publicity for the department, Jones has her arrested and thrown into the psychiatric ward of the L.A. General Hospital, where she endures a snake pit-like treatment. She learns from fellow patient Carol Dexter (Amy Ryan) that hers is standard treatment for any woman who angers the LAPD.
Enter crusading Presbyterian minister Gustav Briegleb (John Malkovich), whom we first see speaking to his congregation, saying that he hopes the police will find and return the boy, but that he doubts it. “The L.A. Police Force is the most, violent, corrupt and incompetent police force this side of the Rocky Mountains,” says the good pastor who had locked horns with corrupt police officials many times before.
Briegleb rescues Mrs. Collins from the mental ward, exposing the head physician’s harsh treatment and collusion with the LAPD. Other hapless women, some of them broken in spirit by their ordeal, are also released from false imprisonment through this effort. Briegleb also introduces her to sympathetic lawyer S.S. Hahn (Geoff Pierson), who agrees to sue the LAPD and Capt. Jones for her pro bono.
How the fate of her son is eventually uncovered, thanks to the good work of police detective Lester Ybarra (Michael Kelly), and the subsequent trial of kidnapper Gordon Northcott (Jason Butler Harner), makes an indelible impression. Northcott, as chilling as Hannibal Lector, plays a sadistic game, admitting his guilt and then denying it. He leaves the distraught mother clinging to faint hope that Walter might not have been one of the boys Northcott and his mother murdered.
It is good to see a minister — especially a Presbyterian — portrayed so favorably. Hollywood all too often uses Protestant ministers as symbols of pomposity or hypocrisy. (The real Briegleb lambasted the motion picture industry during a 1921 General Assembly for such demeaning portrayals.)
Both Malkovich as the minister and Jolie as the grieving mother turn in stellar performances that sweep viewers along in a compelling story in which most of the details are true.
Changeling earned its R (no children) rating, although the violence to the boys is mostly shown indirectly.
—Edward McNulty |
