Changeling (2008) - Rating: 4/5

Second BluRay Disc viewed from Blockbuster's online delivery service. BluRay features not as hi-tech/flashy/impressive as Terminator Salvation. Felt like an X-Men DVD from the early noughties, especially the sound effects.

Enjoyed the documentaries! All singing their praises for Eastwood's Directorial style.

Quite a morose movie... Reminds me a little of the style of Mad Men (though Eastwood's movie is set around 30 years earlier in 1928), with a simultaneous critique and portrait of the shifting social mores of the time, particularly with regards to the Los Angeles Police Department. RIch and meaningful, but deliberately no spectacle either. This is perhaps embodied in Angelina Jolie going Machinist, and John Malkovich playing an ageing, ruggedly, not-so-attractive crusading priest. The only clear-cut glamour is held by: the authorities, looking cool in their top hat long coats, puffing cigarettes out in smokey vignettes; symbols of justice: heroic and outspoken; or corrupt politicians looking seemingly sly, slick, and smooth - where the drama of their situation plays out as anything but.

My primary concern was the notion of how a woman missing her child, and getting that child back again (who's actually a different child altogether) could make for an interesting feature-length movie. And even as a Clint Eastwood fan, I had my doubts.

These doubts were adressed, and I was pleasantly surprised to be exposed to a world that was multi-faceted, layered, with a huge amount of emotional depth, and some profoundly shocking, even disturbing, revelations.

Nothing really happens until about half an hour in... I suppose that's necessary to setup the plot. What follows is a series of intrigues and a couple of plot twists that made for thoroughly engaging viewing. It plays out as something that's relatively well balanced in my view: we truly feel for the protagonist's injustice as she is cruelly victimised, there's a sense of heroism about some of the actions that are undertaken, and there's a rather satisfying conclusion that so easily could have indulged in over-sentimentality and contrivance.

My only criticism lies in the pro-feminist agenda being a touch overplayed in the middle section, and in Angelina Jolie's climactic confrontation scene where I would have expected to see and feel more, of an otherwise very fine performance.

Whilst the production is extremely well-done, it falls short of 'Masterpiece' status, for having such a marginalist focus. I think the great masterpieces of our time have a sense of universality about it, almost a commercial appeal if you like. In Changeling, there's a lingering tension and unease that's never truly resolved upon leaving the film. There's a sense of profoundness that's reserved, understated, and cerebral, instead of being melodramatically explicit, or conclusively decided. And it works much the better for it.

Changeling - perhaps an affectionate term used to describe the figure of the generic 'young boy' throughout the movie, from one person to another; or perhaps the title describes the protagonist herself as someone who, by way of two or three other characters, changes her views and actions to strengthen her ultimate resolve, where she would have otherwise so easily fallen and given up.