Angelina Jolie on the Today Show

Wikipedia’s review roundup – an objective summary of Changeling’s pluses/minuses

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Changeling_(2008_film)#cite_note-newsblaze-33

The film’s screening at the 2008 Cannes Film Festival was met with largely positive reviews, prompting speculation it could be awarded the Palme d’Or.[44] The award eventually went to Entre les murs (“The Class”).[45]

“Jolie puts on a powerful emotional display as a tenacious woman who gathers strength from the forces that oppose her. She reminds us that there is nothing so fierce as a mother protecting her cub.” —Kirk Honeycutt of The Hollywood Reporter on Jolie’s performance.

Todd McCarthy of Variety praised Jolie’s acting as “top-notch”. He said she was more affecting than in A Mighty Heart (2007) due to her relying less on artifice. McCarthy also noted a surfeit of good supporting performances, singling out Michael Kelly in particular.

Oliver Séguret of Libération said the cast was the best aspect of the film. He had praise for the “magnetic” performances of the supporting actors and called Jolie “intense but discreet… beautiful but never dazzling”.

Kirk Honeycutt of The Hollywood Reporter also praised Jolie, saying she shunned her “movie star” persona to appear both vulnerable and resolute at the same time. Honeycutt noted that with the exception of Amy Ryan’s character, the supporting characters had few shades of gray.

David Ansen writing in Newsweek agreed that they could be easily sorted as “black or white”, but that “some stories really are about the good guys and the bad”. He said that when the distractions of Jolie’s celebrity and attractiveness were put aside, she carried the role with “admirable restraint” and “slow burning ferocity”.

David Denby of The New Yorker said that while Jolie’s acting was “skilled and selfless”, the performance and character were uninteresting. He said Collins was one-dimensional, lacking desires or temperament. He cited similar problems with Malkovich’s “uncomplicated” and “impersonal” Briegleb, concluding, “The two of them make a very proper and dull pair of collaborators.”

McCarthy expressed admiration for the “outstanding” script, which he said was ambitious and deceptively simple. He praised Eastwood’s respecting the script through not playing up to the melodramatic aspects of the story, and not telegraphing its eventual scope at the start.

Honeycutt wrote that due to Changeling’s close adherence to the true-life facts of the case, the drama sagged at one point, but that the film didn’t feel as long as its 141 minutes, as the filmmakers were “good at cutting to the chase”

Ansen said Straczynski’s dialogue tended to the obvious, but that while it lacked some of the moral nuance of Eastwood’s other films, the “copiously researched” screenplay as a whole was “a model of sturdy architecture”, each layer of which built audience disgust into a “fine fury”. He said, “when the tale is this gripping, why resist the moral outrage?”

Séguret said that while Eastwood proved he was capable behind the camera, and had presented a solid recreation of the era, he never felt the director was inspired by the challenge the reconstruction posed. Séguret noted that Eastwood kept the embers of the story alight, but that it seldom burst into flames. He said the effect was like placing the audience in the position of a passenger in a limousine with all the options and air conditioning on: comfortable but a little boring.

Denby and Ansen commented that Eastwood left the worst atrocities to audiences’ imaginations. Ansen said this was because Eastwood was less interested in the lurid aspects of the case, and McCarthy praised the more thoughtful than sensationalist treatment.

Denby cited problems with the austere approach, saying it left the film “both impressive and monotonous”. He said Eastwood was presented with the problem of not wanting to exploit the “gruesome” material because this would contrast poorly with the delicate emotions of a woman’s longing for her missing son. He said that Eastwood and Straczynski should have explored more deeply the perverse aspects of the case. Instead, he said, the story played out by methodically settling the emotional and dramatic issues, “reverently chronicling Christine’s apotheosis”, before “[ambling] on for another forty minutes”.

Ansen said the film’s classical approach lifted the story to another level, and that it only embraced horror film conventions while on its way to transcending them.

McCarthy said Changeling was one of Eastwood’s most vividly realised films, citing Stern’s cinematography, the set and costume design, and CGI landscapes that merged seamlessly with the location shots.

Damon Wise of Empire called Changeling “flawless”, and McCarthy said it was “Emotionally powerful and stylistically sure-handed”. He maintained that Changeling was a more complex and wide-ranging work than Mystic River, Eastwood’s 2003 entry at Cannes, and stated that the characters and social commentary were brought into the story with an “almost breathtaking deliberation, as dramatic force and artistic substance steadily mount”. He said that as “a sorrowful critique of the city’s political culture”, Changeling sat in the company of films such as Chinatown and L.A. Confidential.

Honeycutt said that the film added a “forgotten chapter to the L.A. noir” of those films, and that Eastwood’s “melodic” score contributed to an evocation of a city and a period “undergoing galvanic changes”. Honeycutt said that “[the] small-town feel to the street and sets… captures a society resistant to seeing what is really going on”.

Séguret said that while Changeling had no obvious defects, it was “perplexing” that other critics had such effusive praise for the film, and Denby said that it was beautifully made, but that it shared the chief fault of other “righteously indignant” films in its congratulating the audience for feeling contempt for the “long-discredited” attitudes depicted.

Ansen concluded that the story was told in such a sure manner that “only a very hardened cynic” would be left unmoved by the “haunting, sorrowful saga.”

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