Hola all. Massawyrm here.

There’s this great old documentary called James Ellroy: Demon Dog of American Crime Fiction in which, in addition to discussing his youth and predilection towards sneaking into girls houses and sniffing their panties, Ellroy talks about how he came about discovering his voice. Effectively, after writing a novel that was too long, he simply went back and struck just about every other word from the text. The result was a jarring, fever dream like style that he has become famous for – and that Brian Helgeland captured brilliantly in his adaptation of L.A. Confidential. Now imagine, if you will, someone writing a James Ellroy story without striking every other word from the text and you begin to get an idea of what it is to watch Clint Eastwood’s new film Changeling.

Changeling shares an awful lot in common with a classic Ellroy story. Set in 1928 in a burgeoning Los Angeles, the story deals with a terrible crime that leads to an even more heinous crime, and ultimately pulls back the curtain on police corruption and incompetence in the City of Angels. Based upon the horrific and unfortunately all too true Wineville Chicken Coop Murders, the film tries to wrap itself around a terrifying and very convoluted story that begins with a missing person case and ends up becoming a case of serial or mass murder. And as fascinating and enthralling a story as it is, it is tragically mishandled here with focus often put on the wrong elements and entire interesting patches of the real history erased for the sake of telling the story of Christine Collins (Angelina Jolie.)

Changeling’s biggest weakness is its first half – the rather peculiar case of a woman whose son goes missing only to be returned five months later by police. There’s just one snag. It’s not really her son. Rather than admitting their mistake, a press-besieged police force tries to convince the woman that she is losing her mind and is in fact wrong. What follows is a Kafkaesque nightmare as Collins beats her head against the wall of a corrupt bureaucracy. Trouble is that the film is quite clear about the mistake. What works about a Kafka style story like The Trial is the overwhelming feeling of mystery – the not knowing what the hell is going on around the character or why people are doing what they are doing. Not so here. You know exactly why the police are being such bastards, and if that weren’t enough, every person used to convince Collins and the public of her mental instability are portrayed with a heavy handed menace that becomes too much at times. Even the nurses in this film have grown mustaches to twirl as they seem to enjoy issuing such procedures as electroshock therapy.

Had the film played more with Collins state of mind, forcing the audience to question her sanity while good natured people surrounded her trying to help her recognize her own son, then the first half might have worked. Instead it is a frustrating series of sequences in which you want to reach into the film and smack the shit out of people for being so undeniably selfish and downright evil – made even more frustrating by the fact that our heroine is simply an average, every day person of mediocre intelligence. There is no watching her maneuver the bureaucracy, only watching her get swallowed up by it. And the overall experience is a sigh inducing hour and a half (or so) of aggravation. But the movie is two and a half hours.

The last hour gets much more interesting, salvaging the mess of the first half, but never actually saving it. This is where the film gets decidedly faster paced with two diverging story lines to follow. One is about Collins taking on the city and police corruption. The other is about the horrendous murder case that may or may not involve Collins’ son Walter. And this is the story where Eastwood feels more at home. The revelation of the murders, the taking on of city hall – it is at times James Ellroy while others Frank Capra. And that mix is interesting, fresh and a welcome relief from watching this poor woman get tortured over and over again. But as interesting as it is, Eastwood finds himself going back again and again to the well of the tireless mother looking for her son, the repetitive nature of which only weighs down the movie and dilutes the rather disturbing nature of the true story. It even goes so far as to delete a major character from the true story, the mother of the murderer who may or may not have had a hand in the killings herself. In a story so obsessed with the nature of motherhood, I was rather surprised to see them ignore this angle entirely, especially when so much of the film simply languishes and putters along.

But this is a Clint Eastwood film, meaning that no matter how meandering it is, the performances are exquisite, and this is no exception. Jolie, Malkovich, and Feore all give the performances you’ve come to expect from them. None of them are particularly stand outs in their long and illustrious careers, but each one is operating on par with their norm – that is to say better than most others on their best days. Jeffrey Donovan stands out here, even though his physical appearance and dress make him far too much of a dead ringer for Guy Pierce’s Sgt. Edmond Exley in a film that is already far too evocative of L.A. Confidential. He is just so downright despicable and sniveling without seeming cartoonishly dastardly. But best of all is relative unknown Jason Butler Harner’s turn as Gordon Northcott, who plays the man so disturbingly aloof and positively insane that it becomes the one truly fascinating thing to watch in this picture. Every time he’s on screen the film is as good as it gets, and his final moments in the film are so undeniably fucked up that they are something you have to see for yourself. It is a role that is a real career maker and I have no doubt we’ll be seeing more of him in the near future.

Overall the film is something of a frustrating experience; a limp, often boring but well acted film with a story that you just know while watching it could be told so much better. It’s not like the source material needing sexing up at all. In truth they toned it down so they could put the focus upon the first part of the film rather than the second. Kafka without all the Kafka and Ellroy without all the Ellroy is just a movie without. And that is Changeling.

Until next time friends, smoke ‘em if ya got ‘em.

Massawyrm

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