Mother and child reunion

In All About Eve, after Eve (played by Anne Baxter) has told Margo Channing (Bette Davis) and her friends of her tragic journey through life, Margo's dresser, Birdie (played by Thelma Ritter), remarks, "What a story. Everything but the bloodhounds snappin' at her rear end."

If you read an abstract on the life of Christine Collins, your reaction might be similar. Though Eve's story was ultimately revealed as a pack of lies, Christine Collins' perils were all very real. Her story, which has been transformed into Clint Eastwood's latest film, Changeling, seems pulled from old headlines - which is exactly where Eastwood's screenwriter, J. Michael Straczynski, discovered it.

Collins was a single mother who worked in downtown Los Angeles in the late 1920s. One evening she came home from a shift to discover her 9-year-old son, Walter, missing. At first the Los Angeles Police Department did little to help her. But then, needing some good publicity, they became active on Collins' behalf, sending wire bulletins around the country on Walter's disappearance.

Months later, Collins was informed that Walter had been found in the Midwest. Relieved, she paid for his passage to L.A., while the LAPD created a media circus around the mother-son reunion.

If Collins thought her nightmare was over, she was wrong. It had only just begun. The boy that stepped off the train at Union Station was not Walter. With the press hemming in on all sides, the police dismissed her first reaction: "That's not my son." Police Captain J.J. Jones' advice was a veiled warning to her not to make a scene: "Try him out for a couple of weeks" (the line reappears in Eastwood's film).

Changelings are the offspring of elves or trolls that are left in cribs as replacements for human children who have been spirited away. In this case, not only was the replacement Walter temperamentally different from the missing boy, he was also markedly different physically. Along with being considerably shorter than Walter, he was also circumcised. Both conditions were casually dismissed by the LAPD's in-house physician, who told Collins that spontaneous dwarfing and recreational prepuce-snipping were all within the realm of possibility.

When Collins began to publicly air her plight, the LAPD slapped her into an insane asylum, a popular procedure of the time. American mental institutions were the Dachaus of that era, where many "troublesome" people disappeared (the actress Francis Farmer's harrowing tragedy was not uncommon).

Dovetailing with Collins' story was an even more gruesome one: The Wineville Chicken Coop Murders. On the outskirts of Los Angeles, a Canadian madman, Gordon Northcott, was discovered to have hacked a number of missing boys to death with an axe on his desolate farm.

Could Walter have been one of those boys? This is a question that history cannot answer. But by accidentally stumbling upon this vast crime, the LAPD inadvertently helped build a case for Collins' sanity and one against the abuse she suffered at the department's hands.

Eastwood's recent films have been angry examinations of innocent people's lives being destroyed through war (Flags of Our Fathers, Letters from Iwo Jima) and persecution (Mystic River). His indignation over Collins' appalling treatment by the LAPD is raw, as if the events occurred yesterday.

Eastwood's Los Angeles of the 1920s and '30s is a doomed paradise, a place of tropical lushness, battered dreams, fanzine fantasy and radiant corruption. As Collins is being dragged through courts and madhouses, we know that, elsewhere in the city, J.J. Gittes is being inextricably drawn back into Chinatown, while Nathanael West's Homer Simpson is stomping a child actor to death across from Grauman's Chinese Theater.

Running at three hours, Eastwood's film is taut with sustained tension throughout, even when halfway through Changeling shifts its tone to become a police procedural.

Many have focused primarily on the film's Christine Collins, Angelina Jolie, for both good and ill reasons. I think this is perhaps the best work from the chronically uneven Jolie. Unfortunately, some have grossly dismissed her performance as simply a stock little-woman heroine - a Norma Rae or Erin Brockovich in a cloche hat.

Certainly, there's an obvious air of Oscar-worthiness around Jolie's performance. Nonetheless, it is fully earned. Jolie gives an effective, and affective, performance, miles from the canned emotionalism she served up in the properly ignored A Mighty Heart, where, admittedly, she was handicapped by playing a character who was reactive rather than active.

Jolie's Collins is expertly realized. The almost-gaunt star becomes something like Depression glass: seemingly fragile, but annealed for strength.

The rest of the cast is just as solid. John Malkovich plays a corruption-busting minister who sides with Collins against the LAPD, while Jeffrey Donovan's Captain Jones is malignly secure in the conviction that his word, however absurd, is law.

Occasionally, Eastwood can't resist a few Western clichés that would be more at home in his early acting career. Collins saying, "Fuck you, and the horse you rode in on" to the asylum's doctor seems culled from A Fistful of Dollars. There's also a whore with a heart of gold, though Amy Ryan's performance as this hardscrabble Venus risen from the cement is excellent.

Straczynski's dialogue crackles with the colloquialisms of the period, though there are a few missteps. "Serial killer," for instance, is a term coined about 40 years too early.

Changeling may not be of the caliber of Eastwood's twinned Iwo Jima films. But it's a powerful addition to this late American master's filmography.

Steffen Silvis can be reached at
ssilvis@praguepost.com