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The Review - AT THE MOVIES with DAN CARRIER
Published: 27 November 2008

Angelina Jolie plays Christine Collins in Changeling

Eastwood revisits powerful true story of police scandal

THE CHANGELING
Directed by Clint Eastwood
Certificate 12a

THE disappearance of nine-year-old Walter Collins in 1928 set the Los Angeles scandal sheets alight. And the return, after five months, of the child to his frantic mother made happy ending headlines.
However, as this Clint Eastwood-directed film lays out, it was not all it seemed – within days Christine Collins (Angelina Jolie) was doubting whether the child was hers, and began searching for the truth.
As you can imagine with Clint at the helm, this is a polished film. Jolie and John Malkovich rise to the occasion and the fact the story is true means there is little motivation for the director or actors to over-egg it.
It is such a moving tale you could be forgiven if they just went all out for the schmaltz factor. Instead it is downplayed and sober, and all the better for it.
Single mother Collins works at a telephone exchange and looks after her son. One weekend she is called into the office and leaves him home alone – she returns to find him missing, sparking a terrifying five-month ordeal which she believes is over when the Los Angeles Police Department announce with glee they have found her boy.
Except they haven’t.
The department, fearful of the outrage caused by their inability to find the boy, and then the thought the child they have returned to his mother might not be the right one, have reasons to persuade Collins into believing that in fact she has made a mistake, not they.
Malkovich as man-of-cloth Gustav Briegleb has all the righteous indignation you’d expect. He is disgusted by the behaviour of the police and sets out to expose it. Police chief James Davis (Colm Feore) is as horrific an incompetent as you’d never want to deal with.
Eastwood loves a real tale to base his work on and with writer J Michael Straczynski they have done a thorough job bringing the era to life.
You can’t help but feel for Jolie’s character in her battle against the civic authorities. Powerful stuff.

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