Changeling.

Angelina Jolie "doesn't perform in Changeling; she resolutely presents herself to the audience for admiration," writes J Hoberman in the Voice. "The main attraction in [Clint] Eastwood's two-fisted snake-pit weepie is the spectacle of Jolie's steely self-possessed suffering. As she lost her husband to Islamic terrorists in A Mighty Heart, Our Lady of Humanitarian Narcissism here endures another dreadful fate: losing her child to a mob of knaves, know-nothings, and psychos, even as she's persecuted by the entire state institutional apparatus of California."

"Its ingredients are the stuff of gothic nightmares: a kidnapped child, a sane woman incarcerated in a mental institution, a serial killer who slaughters young boys," writes David Ansen in Newsweek. "The sensationalistic aspects of Changeling are not, however, what really interest Eastwood. Though the true, shocking story it's based on has enough melodrama to sustain a season of soap operas, Eastwood's classical repose lifts this lurid tale to a different level."

Updated through 10/24.

"As a piece of filmmaking, Changeling is both impressive and monotonous," writes David Denby in the New Yorker. "The trouble with period movies made by talented craftsmen who are serious about authenticity and consistency is that no one wants to mess up the shots.... I wish that Eastwood and the writer, J Michael Straczynski, had pushed deeper into the perverse strangeness of their story."

"Audiences will be forgiven for reaching for their coats and then putting them down again over and over," observes Alonso Duralde at MSNBC; "everytime you think this tune is done, there's another 38 bottles of beer on the wall. Part of the skill of telling a true story is knowing what parts to leave out, but Straczynski and Eastwood apparently figured we'd all find every last jot and tittle of this tale as fascinating as they did."

"A print afterword to the film tells us that the leadership of the Los Angeles Police Department was removed in the aftermath of the Christine Collins scandal, and reforms were enacted to protect citizens' rights," notes Andrew Sarris in the New York Observer. "Yet, a few years later on the Los Angeles calendar, Roman Polanski and Robert Towne's Chinatown (1974) shows us an LAPD as corrupt as ever. Still, Chinatown now stands out as one of the great American films, whereas Changeling doesn't and probably never will."

David Edelstein in New York: "The way Eastwood shoves Jolie's suffering in our face is like a threat to the Academy: 'And the Oscar will go to...' She's a great actress. She doesn't need his domineering chivalry."

"Eastwood is more at home with less passionate stuff," writes Jesse Hassenger in the L Magazine; "in the background there's John Malkovich as a crusading pastor, and it's fun to watch his unsmiling righteousness, once pitted against Clint in 1993's In the Line of Fire, flipped into a force for good. Even better are the procedural sequences without Jolie, detailing the ins and outs of this strange case with Eastwood's unfussy confidence."

Earlier: Reviews from Cannes and New York.

Updates, 10/23: "The primal horror of this premise - a stranger is suddenly delivered to your home with the bland assurance that he's a member of your family - could have made for a movie as frightening as Invasion of the Body Snatchers and as psychologically astute as Gaslight, the 1944 film in which Charles Boyer slowly convinces a perfectly sane Ingrid Bergman that she's going mad," writes Dana Stevens in Slate. Instead, Changeling settles for middlebrow uplift and handsomely conventional melodrama."

"By some unaccountable phenomena, Clint Eastwood's Changeling resembles a Spike Lee movie," suggests Armond White in the New York Press.

"With Changeling (2008) poised for her Oscar consideration, I've found myself on an Angelina Jolie jag lately," writes Flickhead. "She was once compared to Brando for her remarkable capacity as eye magnet and changeling, and you could take her visceral performance in Gia (1998) as proof. Before that she was in Foxfire (1996), where her tough drifter could be seen as a young incarnation of the fallen manipulator she'd later play in Girl, Interrupted (1999)."

Online viewing tip. FilmCatcher interviews Jason Butler Harner.

"[T]his bustling, complex picture is hobbled by something neither an Academy Award-winning director nor a seductive star can overcome: miscasting," argues Richard Corliss in Time. "With flaring red lipstick on a face that hasn't seen much time in the California sun, and with a grieving matched in severity only by her will to learn the truth, Jolie is supposed to be a regular working mom who rises to meet the challenge of dreadful events. The actress is capable of many things, but being ordinary isn't one of them."

Online listening tip. Eastwood's a guest on Fresh Air.

Updates, 10/24: "To watch [Jolie] trace Christine's harrowing emotional passage - a series of flights from anxiety to terror, from grief to rage, pausing occasionally at calm defiance or tremulous hope - is to witness an undeniable tour de force of screen acting," writes AO Scott in the New York Times. "It insists on being regarded as a great performance and may, indeed, be mistaken for one."

"This is, to put it mildly, a fantastical story, the kind of dark, absurdist allegory that we might have expected to ooze from the pen of Kafka," writes the New Republic's Christopher Orr. "It is also, remarkably, a true (or at least trueish) story, as the film announces in its opening moments. But it is not enough to declare such improbable material historically accurate and leave it at that. It is Eastwood's burden to make it feel true, to overcome our skepticism at its innate outlandishness, and in this, Changeling is a singular failure. Scene after scene, twist after twist - and this is a film of many twists - rings false. I have been a fan (and defender) of Eastwood for as long as I can remember, but Changeling is a genuine stinker."

"Eastwood's film works best as a thorough - and sadly timely - depiction of what happens when a government institution decides that adhering to an official narrative is more important than discovering the truth," writes Keith Phipps at the AV Club.

"[F]or a director who knows how to balance histrionics with a lack of sentimentality (see Mystic River), Eastwood is unable to modulate tone or performances here," writes David Fear in Time Out New York. "No one's perfect, not even our last totem of tough-yet-tender American cinema classicism. But that doesn't excuse such erratic storytelling."

"Eastwood's telling of this story isn't structured as a thriller, but as an uncoiling of outrage," writes Roger Ebert in the Chicago Sun-Times. "It is clear that the leaders of the LAPD serve and protect one thing: its own tarnished reputation."

Eastwood's "five-film, five-year run, from Mystic River in 2003 to this film today, has been the most consistently powerful and affecting force on the American movie scene," argues Kenneth Turan in the Los Angeles Times. "To see this film is to understand both how fragile and how essential our hopes for decency and truth are in a world that must be made to care about either one."

"As for Changeling's classicism, well, if portentous shots of menacing hatchets and crumbling cigarette ashes and characters being startled by the rap of a judge's gavel are what pass for no-nonsense cinematic storytelling today, fine," writes Jonathan Kiefer. "Why not then just go all the way with yet another of Eastwood's own soporific, melodically benumbing piano-tinkle scores to top it all off? Oh, right, he did."

Posted by dwhudson at October 22, 2008 6:13 AM