Changeling.

I sat down and watched Changeling (incidentally, one of the more strangely-named movies I've ever seen) yesterday.. usually not the type of film I jump at, but there was some buzz about it last year during the Oscars and Ebert liked it, and I agree with him more often than I don't. And since Clint Eastwood directs, it's a little more interesting to watch than the average thriller. Unfortunately it ended up being a mixed bag for me.. a strong story with some good acting muddled with some strange choices and poor execution that makes the overall experience very middling.

The story is the strongest aspect, so I'll start there. The crux is the 1920's LAPD, which is corrupt and underhandedly self-serving in some ways as various quick montages and a John Malkovich voiceover testify, and shockingly inept and arrogant in others. This is more strongly demonstrated in their mishandling of a missing child case that victimizes Angelina Jolie's character, a young single mother who works as a supervisor at the local telephone switchboard and lives alone with her young son. Unfortunately the movie doesn't give us much backstory into their lives beyond a few quick scenes of her at work rollerskating around the telephone operator room coolly and efficiently, and disappointing her son by breaking her promise of an afternoon at the movies to fill in for a busy day the office. She arrives home after work to find her son is gone. She desperately files a missing child report, and the police or or less brush her off, saying that the little runaway will probably eventually come back home. Flash forward five months, and the police call with heartlifting news that her son has been found. She meets them at the train station, to discover that, while the boy shares the same name as her missing child, he doesn't even remotely resemble him.

What follows is a series of unbelievable aggravations by the LAPD as they try to convince her that this is really indeed her son, that she doesn't remember him correctly or that he's changed somehow while he was missing. Bizarre explanations by "medical experts" for height discrepancies and other physical differences are flung at the wall, and a few stick but they're all dubious explanations at best. Turns out the LAPD doesn't like to make mistakes, and are willing to do anything to prevent their reputation from being tarnished. Even if it involves sending the mother to the mental institution because she obviously doesn't remember her son correctly. Meanwhile they're wasting time by not looking for the real boy and instead trying to find more reasons why the mother might be delusional.

The story is compelling, but it's not handled very well. The whole affair seems rushed, and it's complicated by a side-story involving one good detective in a sea of corrupt ones, and a disturbing ranch outside of town where abducted boys are taken to be murdered by a deranged serial killer. We don't get hardly any exploration of the killer's character other than he's crazy and evil and likes to keep boys cooped up on his ranch before he kills them. Back in LA, Angelina Jolie's character is befriended by the local Presbyterian priest played by John Malkovich (who seems to be mostly wasting his time with this material and clearly shows it in an uninspiring performance that's mostly read, not acted) who is trying to shine the light of day on the dark underbelly of the LAPD through various dramatic speeches throughout the movie. Before we know it, the mother is condemned as being a lunatic who can't keep her story straight and is thrown in the mental hospital.

Like I said, the story is engaging and inspires a lot of anger and frustration in the viewer as they sympathize with this poor woman, whom society has apparently little respect for. It's an interesting social statement on the kind of adversity women, especially single women, experienced in those days, and the fact that the story is based on true events makes it even more surreal. But the execution is weak. The pacing is bad, dialog is unmoving and uninspired, and backstory is almost nonexistent.

Aside from a waste of John Malkovich's talent, we've got some good, strong performances. Angelina Jolie is strong-willed yet cowering in the face of masculine intimidation, with lots of very strong scenes (notably near the end when she confronts the serial killer in jail, she is particularly startling to watch). Jeffrey Donovan is heartless and cold as the police captain that values his reputation and pride above all else. Jason Butler Harner is sufficiently crazy and deranged as the serial killer. The rest of the supporting cast is solid and believable.

But then we have the music. Clint Eastwood likes to score his own movies for some reason, unfortunately he just doesn't have the chops to do it well. His scores often sound like he spent all of five minutes plunking away on a piano, finding a serene little 5 or 6 note phrase, and building the entire soundtrack around it by having various instruments play a version of it. The music is completely inappropriate in almost every scene, it's repetitive and amateurish. Good music can make a great movie even better (see "The Dark Knight"), and in cases like this it can make a mess of a mediocre movie. If you want to see Clint Eastwood's musical stylings at their worst, watch "Gran Torino" and try sitting through the closing credits as he hoarses his way through the laughably shallow lyrics of the movie's theme song, which he wrote himself.

So overall, a strong, yet mishandled story, above average performances, and a half-hearted soundtrack that stumbles from one scene to the next drags this movie out until it collapses twenty minutes past the two hour mark. Oscar material it ain't.. if you want to see a 20's period noir there are plenty others that are way better.