With all attendant hoopla for the benefit of the press and police, a reunion is arranged at the train station, but, as soon as the boy steps onto the platform, Christine knows this kid is not her son. Nearly five months later, Christine is informed that her son has been found in Illinois. One day when Christine is late getting home from work, Walter is gone.

Early sound films were loaded with scenes of smart-talking women handling phone lines Eastwood takes advantage of the inspiration of skates to cover them in neat tracking shots. Christine has the photogenic job of telephone supervisor on roller-skates, overseeing dozens of female operators as they connect calls at a giant switchboard. With a melancholy mood set by Eastwood’s typically spare guitar-and-piano score, the languid opening stretch stresses the ordinary nature of life for single mother Christine Collins (Jolie) and her 10-year-old son Walter (Gattlin Griffith), who share a modest house in a quiet neighborhood in Los Angeles. Characters and sociopolitical elements are introduced with almost breathtaking deliberation, as dramatic force and artistic substance steadily mount across the long-arc running time. Michael Straczynski (creator of TV’s “Babylon 5”) has deceptive simplicity and ambition to it, qualities the director honors by underplaying the melodrama and not signaling the story’s eventual dimensions at the outset. Graced by a top-notch performance from Angelina Jolie, the Universal release looks poised to do some serious business upon tentatively scheduled opening late in the year.Ĭonstructed around the infamous “Wineville Chicken Murders” in Riverside County, Calif., which achieved great notoriety at the time and, surprisingly, have never inspired a film before, the outstanding screenplay by J. Emotionally powerful and stylistically sure-handed, this true story-inspired drama begins small with the disappearance of a young boy, only to gradually fan out to become a comprehensive critique of the entire power structure of Los Angeles, circa 1928. A thematic companion piece to “Mystic River” but more complex and far-reaching, “Changeling” impressively continues Clint Eastwood’s great run of ambitious late-career pictures.

Changeling jason butler harner