Everything seems to be going wrong during that controversial story. The story began in 1928 in Los Angeles, where single mother Christine Collins (Angelina Jolie) takes charge of the Los Angeles Police Department because of her own harm when she stubbornly tries to extract a protester as a missing child and perhaps a seemingly dangerous task. Perhaps in the end, that woman also refuses to give up hope of looking for what is missing.
What we're left with is a straightforward sob story; a haunting, matter-of-fact depiction of cruel injustice that couldn't fail to touch a nerve in any context.
In a movie "based on" a true story, if the drama doesn't have a ring of authenticity, it can seem even more suspect than fiction, especially if the source material is distant and obscure: it makes you wonder what really happened.
It is a misfire, a silly and borderline absurd story that cannot excuse its twists and turns with the simple 'a true story' declaration that opens the film.
If Changeling lacks the knockout power of, say, Million Dollar Baby, it proves that Eastwood continues to seek out stories that take him places he hasn't been before -- and the audience along with him.
Jolie is alternately distraught and outraged (in good ways) but Eastwood's film is an odd mix of genres that never quite settles into the one we want to watch.
Eastwood's latest confirms its director as the dean of American melodramatists and as an accomplished yet unadventurous artist as uncomfortable with ambiguity as his admirers appear to be.
