Heavy-handed direction turns one woman's ordeal into a sensationalist affair Changeling (15) dir: Clint Eastwood

Motherhood, madness and melodrama

When the word "honestly" is used as a suffix to statements such as "I love you" or "I'll pay you back", it tends to have the opposite effect to the one intended. Likewise, you have to wonder what a film that announces itself as "a true story" has to hide. The plot of Clint Eastwood's Changeling is peculiar enough to justify some manner of corroboration, but its pre-emptive declaration of truth only makes its distortions more outrageous. Drawing on facts is not at all the same thing as honouring them, and the ordeal of Christine Collins and her nine-year-old son, Walter, in 1928 Los Angeles is ill served by the picture's exploitative tenor.

Christine (Angelina Jolie) is a telephone operator who lives as frugally as any single mother with a fetish for cloche hats can expect to. Returning late from work one day, she finds Walter (Gattlin Griffith) gone from his usual spot in front of the radio. The police refuse to investigate until the child has been missing for at least 24 hours; meanwhile, the Reverend Gustav Briegleb (John Malkovich), whose hatred of the LAPD is almost as fearsome as his crimped hair, takes up cudgels on Christine's behalf.

It feels at first as though the reverend must have some hidden agenda, but as one never emerges, we can probably put it down to Malkovich's artfully distracted line readings, which suggest he is pursuing Christine's campaign in between solving the world's most taxing crossword, pondering the nothingness of being and having his feet massaged by concubines.

After five months, the LAPD announces it has found Walter. A reunion is hastily arranged in full view of photographers. There's only one problem: the boy who flings his arms around Christine and calls her "Mommy" is not Walter. Captain Jones (Jeffrey Donovan) knows his beleaguered LAPD needs some positive press, so he bullies Christine into clutching Walter Mk II (Devon Conti) to her bosom. "Take him home on a trial basis," he suggests, as though the kid were a vacuum cleaner that could be exchanged at point of purchase.

Sitting in her kitchen that night, the shell-shocked mother watches as the child tucks into a sandwich. Jolie, who is never shy about using her eyes the way other people use full-beam headlights along dark country lanes, conveys a cowed horror; she might be wondering if the boy is going to move on to her once he's cleared his plate.

That nicely played scene made me think of Raú Ruiz's Comedy of Innocence, about a woman whose son announces one day that he has another mother, or Luis Buñuel's Phantom of Liberty, in which a girl accompanies her oblivious parents to the police station as they file a missing person report on her. No one expects such surrealism from Eastwood, but what is so disappointing about Changeling, especially after the sensitivity of Letters from Iwo Jima, is how far in the opposite direction it swings. Any ambiguity or mystery is trampled over by camerawork and music so overbearing that they make Captain Jones seem like a beacon of fond counsel.

What a complex film this might have been if the bogus Walter had been cast to resemble the real one more closely, introducing the tiniest hint that Christine could be mistaken, or if Eastwood's direction had become cooler as the case grew more heated. Instead, the picture can't conceal its relish as Christine's plight worsens. When she refuses to accept her son's return, Captain Jones commits her to a mental institution, and you just know what's coming: the naked hosing-down scene, the smattering of Nurse Ratched types, the shock treatment accompanied by amplified thunderclaps. The full Roger Corman, in other words.

In a less self-righteous picture, this dumbness could be a gas. Cigarette ash falling to the floor in slow motion at the end of a shocking revelation; the asylum's raggle-taggle inmates triumphantly liberated with no apparent consideration for where these penniless, unstable creatures are going to find shelter - isn't this the sort of hokum we come to whoop at? The trouble is that Eastwood plays it with a phoney poker face.

He thinks he's a campaigner. In fact, he's a sensationalist. He doesn't make you salute Christine for her perseverance; you just admire her for never failing to put her lipstick on straight, no matter how tough the going gets.

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