What is it about the police force that many a time makes them seem worse than criminals? In Changeling, the Los Angeles Police Department is incompetent, corrupt, and ruthless. Five months after a nine-year-old disappears, they publically announce that he has been found. This is a partially true story of an independent woman who is coerced by the law to fake a smile for the Press, forced to look after a boy who is not hers, and framed and denied her fundamental rights.
The visuals and dialogues within the first ten minutes establish the necessary facts: that the film is set in the early twentieth century; that the family is affluent and the son lives with a single parent, his mother, who is too caught up with work; and that he is of a very certain height. Although it touches upon the infamous Wineville Chicken Coop Murders (from Collins’ point of view), the emphasis is less about the murderer and the missing children and more about the agony and humiliation that a mother is subjected to.
It is quite understandable that a filmmaker is necessitated to employ cinematic license for various reasons. But there should be a limit to this. It has become a fashion these days to twist and stretch the truth and to invent facts in biopics and historical films. Often, to make the lead characters more endearing to the spectators and the films more saleable to the awards juries.
Jolie at the start is smiling, caring, and firm. As the film progresses, concern, disbelief, sadness, fear, and anger sets in, and she wails, violently and helplessly. Eventually, her face regains calmness, and she demonstrates immense inner strength and courage. All this is nice. What isn’t is that, in addition to the concoctions and omissions in the story being told, a post script at the end of the film too ‘informs’ the spectator of things that never actually happened in real life.
All the same, Clint Eastwood has done it again, the best he can. This time his social drama reenacts parts of an ugly incident from the past; and makes a statement on a hooligan law enforcement system that, far from doing its duties, tried to cover up its inefficiency by throwing a normal, innocent citizen who dared to stand up against them into a mental asylum. It also draws attention to the power of a non-commercial, conscientious media in effecting justice and change.
