Changeling | John Benton

LAPD blown

CHANGELING
Cert. 15, 2 hours 20 minutes
Director: Clint Eastwood

This is a rather grim true story which pushes buttons and sounds valuable warnings about modern society.

In March 1928 eight-year-old Walter Collins went missing from his home in Los Angeles while his single mother was out at work at the telephone exchange. The LA Police Department of the time was thoroughly corrupt and showed little sympathy with the mother, Christine Collins (Angelina Jolie).

A few months later a boy was found and presented by the police to Mrs Collins as her son, amid positive media publicity for the LAPD. The problem was that she knew it was not her son. In the film, coerced to take the boy temporarily she complies, but when she becomes increasingly convinced it is not her boy the police turn on her and eventually have her forcibly admitted to a harsh psychiatric unit.

Meanwhile a Presbyterian minister (John Malkovich) takes up the case on his local radio broadcast and it is only through his intervention that she is released. (Yes, a Christian portrayed fairly positively. The age of miracles is not past!) From here a gruesome tale of child murder and exposure of police cover-ups begins to unfold.

Major themes are explored in the film. We are shown the tyranny which results when unaccountable law enforcement and quack scientific ‘experts’ join hands. Whatever a suspect may protest, there is always a police psychologist to explain the protest away, especially if the protester is an ‘unstable’ woman. There is the theme of how concern for media profile distorts truth. (Is this the Achilles heal of Western democracy?) The police do not want to be shown to have made errors. Too much politics and too many careers are on the line. The film also includes the call for little people — including the church — to be unafraid to take on the authorities when justice is at stake.

It pushes the contemporary button of experts wishing to dictate family life — here to the extent of telling a mother who is and who isn’t her child. But against this oppressive background there is the wonderful and hopeful note of the uniqueness and joy of ordinary homely love between a parent and a child.

It is a film worth seeing, though some scenes are not for the squeamish.