Changeling Provokes an Emotional Response

My friend Mike summed up one aspect of this film with the comment, “The half of the audience that doesn’t have kids was watching this movie on a whole different level.” Director Clint Eastwood’s Changeling brings to mind other recent films wherein parents deal with tragic circumstances involving their children: Gone Baby Gone and Eastwood’s Mystic River among them. The emotional core of films like Changeling rely on the audience empathizing with the pain of a parent who loses a child, and Angelina Jolie delivers her best performance in years as a mother whose son is nowhere to be found when she returns from work.

Set in Los Angeles during the 1920’s, Changeling is a true story. Eastwood works from a marvelous canvas in this period film. Its rich set and costume design suits the movie’s slow and deliberate pacing, and Eastwood’s minimalist musical score allows the audience to immerse itself not only in this world of 1920’s L.A. but in Jolie’s solid performance as a determined woman who repeatedly insists that a corrupt police captain help her find her son. John Malkovich is superb as a minister who rallies to Jolie’s aid, and the supporting cast lends itself to what is in the end a very well made but emotionally draining film.

**** out of 5 stars.