Tuesday, Nov. 04, 2008

'Changeling' could've been shorter, better

By Edward Robertson, atomictown.com

Twenty minutes into Changeling, all I would have had to say about it was "It was...good."

That freaks me out sometimes, thinking I'm not going to end up with anything to say about a movie. I'm used to having many loud and correct opinions, as the jury of cats I assemble to hear my morning tirades can attest (tomorrow's agenda: Shed Less Or I Start Eating You).

When a movie's just there doing its thing being kinda good, I end up panicking and doing some pocket-texting to the boys down at Pure Reason Laboratories to get cracking on some fake plots and complaints so I can yet again pretend to be insightful.

But almost always, except the 30% of the time when I just make stuff up, I've got something to say by the time the movie ends. This leads me to the inescapable conclusion anyone can write an interesting beginning, but coming up with a satisfying conclusion is nigh-on impossible.

Logically, then, movies should start with the ending first, so we know whether it's worth our time to stay and sit through the beginning, but as Hollywood isn't returning my calls on that idea just yet, looks like we'll have to keep on suffering through the mounting disappointment of films like Changeling in the meantime.

As a single working mother in the 1920s, Angelina Jolie sometimes has to leave her young son home alone. After being kept late at work one day, she returns to find her son is gone.

The notoriously corrupt local cops are slow to respond, but four months later, they bring her the news she's been waiting for: they've found her son, and they're bringing him home. When the boy steps off the train, Jolie knows at once he's not her son.

The cops convince her she's just distraught, but she soon finds physical evidence the kid isn't who he says he is. But the cops, in bad need of positive press, stick with their story -- and the harder Jolie fights to get them to resume the search, they harder the police push to discredit her as a madwoman.

Changeling is a true story, but I'm not sure that's a good thing. After a strong start diving into a supremely creepy premise of a mother railroaded into replacing her son with a kid she knows isn't hers, things get increasingly melodramatic the further we get into the "facts," most of which consist of the police acting like big ol' assholes. Speaking as a young punk, I totally already knew that.

Jolie's acting follows suit. At first, she's got some charm and depth, but she soon ends up with nothing more to say than "I want my son back," "I want my son back," and "I just want my son back!"

Yet director Clint Eastwood's competent hand and elegant cinematography make Changeling look, for a while, like an important drama.

There may well have been one in here. Despite its based-in-truth handicap, there are some potentially compelling characters, including John Malkovich as an anti-corruption crusading pastor, but in long-time TV writer J. Michael Straczynski's script, none of them emerge as more than types. By the time the cops really get on Jolie's case, things couldn't be more good vs. evil if in the big finale Jolie knocked the police captain and the One Ring into the cracks of Mount Shasta.

While the middle just spins its wheels, the ending completely stalls out, culminating in two court trials, each more riveting than the last. Half an hour of resolution could easily have been condensed into 10 minutes, but doing that might have preserved some of our dramatic interest.

By the time the perversely cheery ending rolled around, I was thinking more about what Changeling could have been than what I'd just seen.

Grade: C+