If you couldn’t tell by our half-written review of Clint Eastwood’s “Changeling,” we were having problems articulating what we didn’t like about it. We slept on it a bit and have a few more thoughts to complete a “review.” It was by no means terrible; it’s solid filmmaking and definitely meticulously crafted with a lot of attention to detail. But after a while it felt rote, by-the-numbers drama and almost a little soulless.
Eastwood can make these pictures in his sleep at this point and he does, having essentially made the exact same mood and manner of drama about four or five times in a row now. Artists are generally scolded for this, but Eastwood is generally celebrated for this cinematic repetition.
Another major issue we had was the tone of the “heroes and villains” in the story. Perhaps its by proxy of the setting, the late 1920s where the LAPD was so corrupt they could get away with murder (literally), but the nature of their outrageous nefariousness and unbelievable actions and excuses in the story (returning a different child to Angelina Jolie’s mother character after she’s lost her child and insisting its hers) made the division seem very black and white.
While the police, the bad guys here, didn’t have oily moustaches that they defiantly twirled at the hapless and helpless protagonist, it wasn’t much further from that idea which was pretty annoying. Perhaps it fits the tone and attitudes of people back then, but these days, we’re (generally) accustomed to good and evil characters with shades of grey and here the shadow and light was cast pretty precisely.
Karina at Spoutblog saw the film yesterday too and she wrote up some thoughts that we agree with too, but she’s a little bit harsher on the film than we were.
“The evil detective (Jeffrey Donovan) can’t figure out if the ensuing scandal means he should have an Irish accent or not,” this makes us chuckle. She’s right, his accent vacillated all over.
“Eastwood can’t help but indefinitely extend the misery,” she writes of the film’s exorbitant length which we also complained about yesterday. While she’s a little harsh here, there’s some elements of truth when she says the film is a “cheap-looking Lifetime movie that eventually turns into an “And justice for all!” episode of SVU.” We’d never say it looked cheap, the cinematography, art direction and all that was solid, but the “Lifetime” feel and outraged tipping of the scales mien was definitely apparent.
Jolie was good, but all and all [B-].
Here’s Eastwood talking about the character Christine Collins at the New York Film Festival Q&A and what we know of what happened to her after the film ends.
Watch: Eastwood Talks Trying To Avoid “Melodrama” And “Sensationalism” In Changeling