Clint Eastwood works masterfully behind the camera, and Angelina Jolie delivers a career-best performance in “Changeling”

By ANDY CARROLL
UNLEASHED STAFF

By definition, a changeling is a child who is secretly exchanged for another. But a secret exchanging of children is just one of the many real horrors addressed in “Changeling,” Clint Eastwood’s latest film.
Released at the end of October — and the start of a particularly slow awards season in Hollywood — “Changeling” is a mature and unsettling film that takes its viewers down paths not adequately hinted at in the trailers.
“Changeling” is based on the true story of the Wineville Chicken Coop Murders, which actually occurred in California in the late 1920s, and involved many of the names featured in the movie. The fact that the events depicted in the movie are inspired by actual events only makes it more unsettling.
The time is 1928. The place is Los Angeles. And the focus is a single working mother, Christine Collins (Angelina Jolie).
Christine works for a telephone company during the day and cares for her young son, Walter (Gattlin Griffith), at night. She returns one night to discover he is nowhere to be found. Thus begins a months-long search to find the boy.
By what at first seems to be a miraculous turn of events, police inform Christine they have found her son in Illinois. But upon seeing the boy, Christine knows he is not Walter. But the police, wanting to avoid further negative attention from the press, insist the boy is indeed Walter Collins, even though Christine has physical evidence, the testimonies of others, and her own motherly instinct saying otherwise.
After pestering police, the officer in charge of the investigation (Jeffrey Donovan) has Christine sent off to a mental institution, where she gains even more knowledge of the corruption evident within the city’s police force.
Meanwhile, police detective Lester Ybarra (Michael Kelly) is looking into a case involving a minor named Sanford (Eddie Alderson), who immigrated illegally from Canada and claims to have been involved in a series of brutal murders in Wineville, Calif. He tells Ybarra his guardian Gordon Northcott (Jason Butler Harner) forced him to participate in abducting and killing young children in the chicken coops on his farm. Could the missing Walter Collins be connected to the case?
In the dramatic thriller, Eastwood works masterfully behind the camera. The tension can be felt from the very beginning, welcomed by an eerie score (also the work of Eastwood) and grayed cinematography. Eastwood ups the ante as the story advances, eventually showing particularly disturbing scenes within the psychiatric ward and the coop in Wineville.
Though the film contains few instances of onscreen violence, it earns its R-rating by instead presenting some of the most unnerving scenes of any movie this year. Without resorting to a hardcore display of gore and eviscerations, “Changeling” manages to deliver very creepy and frightening moments, something not many period pieces can claim. Though the film does let up as it comes to a close, it remains a film capable of having its viewers biting their nails as their hearts pound.
Jolie delivers a career-best performance, playing against her type-casting and discarding her standard sex appeal for a highly mature and affecting performance. Proof of her incredible range can be seen in the extreme contrast between Christine’s self-presentation of a sane woman in an alien world with her Oscar-winning role in 1999’s “Girl, Interrupted,” in which Jolie plays an out-of-control sociopath.
But Harner and Alderson are also great in the film’s most disturbing roles. Though both are Hollywood unknowns, they execute their roles with just the right amount of creepiness and disturbed loss of innocence, respectively.
Most filmmakers lose steam as they get older, but 78-year-old Eastwood has only gotten better in his old age. “Changeling” is Eastwood’s fifth film in six years (with “Gran Torino” on the way in December), and it is a worthy addition to a recent résumé that includes films like “Mystic River” and “Million Dollar Baby.”
“Changeling” is a haunting and powerful drama, and one of Hollywood’s best offerings in the past few months.

— Andy Carroll is a member of the Yakima Herald-Republic’s Unleashed team. He attends La Salle High School.