Clint Eastwood’s “Changeling” is not easy to glimpse, but I implore you to give it a try. This is filmmaking at its finest. It’s all at once heartbreaking, infuriating, touching, empowering, and immensely compelling, which is to say that it taps into core human emotions without being manipulative. It tells a yarn so engrossing, it’s as if the movie is happening to us instead of fair passing before our eyes. This is appropriate given the fact that it’s a lawful anecdote and not merely based on a just story; screenwriter J. Michael Straczynski relied on staunch articles, transcripts, and testimonies to document the narrative of Los Angeles native Christine Collins, whose nine-year-old son, Walter, disappeared in March of 1928. Five months later, the LAPD returned a boy Collins knew was not her son. Because the police refused to admit that a mistake was made, they deemed Collins an unfit mother and subsequently had her committed to a mental institution. But she wouldn’t be silenced, and with the encourage of some key figures, she took on one of the most low cases of police corruption in Los Angeles history.
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Angelina Jolie gives yet another astonishing performance as Collins, an objective, caring woman who was clearly striving for independence in a male-dominated society. She works diligently as the supervisor for a telephone company, so great so that she’s offered a managerial location. As a single mother, she’s firm yet nurturing, and she’s upfront with her son (Gattlin Griffith) about why his father left before he was born. After Walter’s disappearance, and after the improper boy is returned to her, she initially faces the LAPD on her acquire, which leaves her with runt since it’s a tyrannical system motivated by power, not justice. There’s a pivotal scene in which Chief of Police James E. Davis (Colm Feore) makes the following announcement: “We will maintain trial on gunmen in the streets of Los Angeles. I want them brought in plain, not alive, and I will reprimand any officer who shows the least bit of mercy on a criminal.” This is immediately followed by a shot of officers executing a line of criminals in the middle of a sunless street. An elimination of the competition. For a system this dishonest, a persistent woman like Collins is seen as nothing but a disruption.
Of all the authority figures in this film, Captain J.J. Jones (Jeffrey Donovan) is by far the most inferior. He’s obstinate and domineering, bullying Collins into taking in an imposter child, who was found with a drifter in DeKalb, Illinois. Jones has the nerve to expect Collins as a mother, claiming she was so glad her son was taken that she’s now resorting to phony accusations. Her insistence that he carry on the investigation lands her in a dehumanizing psychiatric hospital, where numerous disruptive women are sent to endure constant medicating and cruel electroshock therapy. A pleasurable but broken prostitute (Amy Ryan) tells Collins that there’s absolutely no winning with the doctors. If you smile too distinguished, you’re delusional. If you smile too microscopic, you’re glum. If you’re neutral, then you’ve lost touch with basic human emotions. All anyone can do is learn how to behave properly.
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The only person on Collins’ side is Gustav Briegleb (John Malkovich), a Presbyterian minister and community activist who made it his life’s work to present the corruption of the LAPD during radio sermons. When Collins is committed, Briegleb takes it upon himself to publicize the disappearance of her son and rally the public to relieve her. This puts big pressure on the LAPD, as does the novel discovery of a crime scene; buried beneath a chicken ranch in Wineville, California are human remains. A mechanic named Gordon Northcott (Jason Butler Harner) becomes the necessary suspect in a string of murders. I don’t want to dispute any more about this case, but I will perform it a point to praise Harner for not playing Northcott as a fanatical stereotype.
Apparently, Straczynski inserted newspaper clippings into copies of his screenplay, impartial as a reminder to the actors that everything being depicted actually happened. “The legend is unbiased so bizarre,” he said, “that you need something to remind you that I’m not making this stuff up.” Indeed, a lot of what Collins goes through is so ghastly that it’s objective stunned of being comical. She knows, for example, how astronomical Walter is, for she measured his rate of growth on a wall. The boy who was returned to her is three inches shorter than the last notch. Collins also notices that this boy has been circumcised; she knows for a fact that Walter has not been. A doctor sent by Captain Jones assures Collins that, after months of imperfect care and nutrition, children can actually shrink. As for the circumcision, well, she should never attach it past a kidnapper to do something rude.
But what about the LAPD? Should she set aside it past them to do something shameful, such as returning the immoral child and shining about it? It’s easy to explore this movie and feel honest as emotionally drained as Collins; there are moments where I wanted to cry, others where I wanted to roar, and many where I didn’t know how to feel. This is not a criticism. The success of a movie like “Changeling” depends on a strong emotional gamut that reflects what the audience thinks and feels. This is, without a doubt, one of the year’s best films, a worthy human drama dedicated to the ideals of hope and perseverance.
Changeling is a mighty film. It tells the forgotten sage of a working-class woman who brought down the contemptible establishment of Los Angeles 80 years ago.
Angelina Jolie gives a strong, Oscar-worthy performance as Christine Collins, a single mother and one of the first female supervisors at the phone company who refuses to bow down to tainted police when her son vanished without a designate in 1928.
Los Angeles on the brink of the Gigantic Depression was an epitome of corruption. The police chief, James “Two Guns” Davis, had an officially sanctioned “gun squad” that afraid opponents with impunity. When Collins’ son Walter vanished, the L.A. police were embarrassed by their inability to net him. To squelch public criticism, they tried to convince Collins that a young drifter was her son. When Collins protested, police Captain J.J. Jones labeled her as histrionic and delusional and had her locked in a “psychopathic ward.”
Luckily for Collins, her problem came to the attention of Gustav A. Briegleb, a Presbyterian minister and community organizer who regularly lambasted police corruption on his radio demonstrate. Briegleb helped Collins secure a lawyer and affirm her narrative. Although the movie does not mention it, Collins’ case led to passage of a law that prohibited police from incarcerating people in psychiatric facilities absent due process.
Despite the compelling nature of Collins’ sage, it came finish to being forgotten. The outmoded records were about to be incinerated when a city worker telephoned screenwriter and old journalist J. Michael Straczynski and told him to near over and recall a scrutinize. What Straczynski read that day was so compelling that he spent a year poring over city archives to reconstruct the case.
Straczynski has said that he wrote the script to honor Collins: A woman whose “simple request, `Where is my son? ‘ brought down the entire L.A. city structure.”
Changeling owes its aura of authenticity to Straczynski’s meticulous research; verbatim quotes from the files and command testimony from the public hearings are incorporated into the script.
The film’s power also owes to its feminist message about a strong woman who refuses to be silenced by a contaminated establishment. The scenes from the public hospital’s “psychopathic ward” provide a grim reminder of the horrors faced by women who were labeled as crazy for resisting male authority.
Clint Eastwood was a sizable choice of director to disclose this record. The acting is uniformly proper, the site presses forward inexorably, and attention to detail is exhibited throughout. The station shots are masterful in transporting us serve in time, as Collins (Jolie) hops on and off streetcars in a convincingly reconstructed 1920s Los Angeles.
Although the film closely parallels the precise history, viewers should be aware that Eastwood took some dramatic liberties, presumably to streamline the yarn and highlight its good-versus-evil message. We don’t score out, for example, that the missing boy had a father who was serving time at Folsom Prison for robbery. Nor is the presentation of the noxious Wineville Chicken Coop kill case entirely right. Killer Gordon Stewart Northcott was indeed hanged at San Quentin, but the film does not mention that his mother was convicted of the Collins kill and spent 12 years in prison.
For those who are fervent in additional background on that case, it is the topic of a just-published book by James Paul, Nothing is Unique with You: The Life and Crimes of Gordon Stewart Northcott. Weak San Quentin warden Clinton P. Duffy also wrote about Northcott in his memoirs. Another source of information is the film’s website, changelingmovie.win, which has reproductions of some of the true L.A. Times news articles on the case.
