Do you ever have that dream

Where you open your mouth and try to scream

But you can’t make a sound

That’s every day starting now

That’s every day starting now… 

                                                            –Ani Difranco, “Wish I May”

This must be what it feels like to be Angelina Jolie in “Changeling.”    Her eight year old son disappears, which is enough in itself to make anyone mother scream herself hoarse.   The police tell her she can’t even file a report for 24 hours, because “99 times out of a hundred, the kid finds his way home.”    Then, when they finally do start looking for him, sure enough they find him – or, at least, they find someone willing to pretend to be him, in order to get a free ride to Hollywood and a chance to meet some movie stars. 

This is where the screaming begins.

Set in Los Angeles in 1928, “Changeling” is based on the true story Christine Collins and her boy Walter.    Several months after reporting her son missing, the LAPD told her they had found him in the company of a drifter in Illinois.  They staged a big, teary reunion, convinced her to take the boy home despite her protestations that he wasn’t her son, and, when she continued to protest, brought in “experts” to explain how he could possibly have dramatically changed in appearance, shrunk several inches and been circumcised without remembering the event while he was gone.   She continued to protest, so they declared her psychotic and locked her away for good.   Case closed. 

The first half of “Changeling” plays like a paranoid fantasy, like “The Forgotten”  in period costume.   It would not be a stretch to set this story in the near future and call it a cautionary tale.   As Jolie bounces from one Male Authority Figure to another, director Clint Eastwood establishes a consistent tone: each of them treat her with the same kind of aggressive anticipation: they establish “the facts” so that all she can do is contradict them, they put words in her mouth, they make her choose between two falsehoods.   In a movie about the absolute oppression and silencing of a woman, it is the men who seem constantly afraid – afraid of what might happen if she is actually allowed to speak her mind.  

John Malkovich plays a radio preacher who makes it his job to announce the corruption and brutality of the LAPD.   When he hears of Collins’ complaints, he makes moves to help her out, perhaps sensing that this case might garner enough publicity to actually bring about some change, or perhaps just realizing that he has an obligation to plead the case of the widow and orphan (Isaiah 1:17.)   It is Malkovich who springs her from the psycho ward; and thank God.   Without him, it seemed to easy to believe that she would remain there until they had shocked her brain away for good.  

“Changeling” is a movie about the police doing everything they can – that is, everything they can do to garner good publicity and to make people with real problems go away and leave them alone.   They do next to nothing to actually fight crime, solve cases, or do justice.   In the middle of “The Changeling” is a brutal serial killer who kidnaps little boys, drives them out to a chicken farm on the edge of town, and brutally murders him there.   When he is caught, a reporter asks him how he’d evaded arrest for so long.   “Never knew anybody was looking for me,” he remarks.   That’s because no one was.  

As a director, Clint Eastwood always makes morally, thematically interesting films, even if his technique and storytelling are a little sloppy.   In the second half of “Changeling,”  Eastwood overreaches; he wants to compare the apprehension and trial of a sick and twisted serial killer with the apprehension and trial of a corrupt police chief, and ask us which is worse.    Thematically, it’s a compelling question.  Cinematically, it’s a train wreck.   The movie loses steam and energy as it moves further and further away from its climax without ever approaching resolution; there’s a confusing parallel-court scene and an overwrought execution scene straight from “Dead Man Walking” or “Capote.”    Eastwood needed a firm, ruthless editor who could remind him which story was the main one, but didn’t have that person on the payroll.   It’s a relief when “Changeling” regains its footing for its final ten minutes; it ends with a bang that might help you to forget the sloppiness of its last hour.  

 Recommended

• To fans of Clint Eastwood’s past efforts (Mystic River, Million Dollar Baby, etc.)
• To feminists, and anyone who enjoyed “The Duchess.”
• If you like movies that ask big questions, even if they do so sloppily.
• If you’re a budding screenwriter, and would like to see an example of a story that would definitely benefit from non-chronological storytelling.

Not Recommended

• If you think “Angelina Jolie” and you think tight and scant clothing, dominatrix attitude, etc. 
• If “the Duchess” was all the female misery you can take for now. 
• If you don’t like movies that feel longer than they are.  
• If you’re tired of police – particularly LAPD -  getting a bad rap in the movies.

The song quoted at the top of the review is from Ani Difranco’s album “To The Teeth” and is used entirely without permission.  

There is a thing in Hollywood called a MacGuffin.   Hitchcock named it this, but it’s been in movies for as long as there have been movies.   In short, it’s the thing that everyone wants; it motivates the characters and advances the plot.  It’s the  Maltese Falcon, the Allspark in Transformers, the glowing suitcase in Pulp Fiction,  the letters of transit in Casablanca.    In “Burn After Reading,”  it’s a CD containing encrypted files, except…it isn’t.    As soon as the MacGuffin is revealed, we, in the audience know it’s worthless, and before the movie is half over, the characters know it’s worthless as well.   And yet they keep going as if it mattered.   This, I suppose, is the Coen brothers’ MacGuffin Twist.    I’m not sure what I think of it.

“Burn After Reading” stars John Malkovich as an ex-CIA analyst, who continues to prove my theory that this actor is incapable of playing normal, well-adjusted people.    His ice queen wife is Tilda Swinton, who is having an affair with George Clooney.  Their scenes here couldn’t help but remind me of their scenes in “Michael Clayton,” (“I’m not the guy you kill!”)  a far superior movie.  Clooney cruises the internet for chicks, where he picks up Frances McDormand, who is trying to find a way to fund extensive plastic surgery (“I think this body has taken me about as far as it’s going to.”)  McDormand works at a gym with a gum-chewing, Jamba-Juice slurping Brad Pitt, and Richard Harris, who is secretly in love with McDormand, pre-surgery body notwithstanding.    Pitt finds a CD with “serious &*%*” on it in the locker room, which belongs to Malkovich.  And the circle is complete.

The actors are clearly having fun; they play their roles broadly, like this is an extended Saturday Night Live sketch.  If only watching them were as much fun.   Pitt is entertaining, for certain, and again I’m reminded what range and talent this oft-overlooked actor has.   But I’ve never really enjoyed George Clooney’s idiot character (this, according to the Coens, is the third in their “idiot trilogy,” all starring Clooney) and the rest….well, there’s a reason SNL sketches are only five minutes long.  As their lunacy descends into pure idiocy and then pointlessness, it’s hard to keep caring, or keep laughing.   And then there’s the violence, which almost rewards the viewer for not caring about the characters.   Not sure how that works, either.

Joel and Ethan Coen oft-praised for so much of their craft, are oft criticized for not respecting their characters.   I’d never given this criticism much credence before, because I have deeply enjoyed so many of their movies.   But this time, it’s crystal clear.   Everyone in this movie is a desperate idiot, and we’re supposed to laugh at them, even at their grisly and shocking deaths (the violence is “Burn After Reading” is sudden and shocking.)   I think this is supposed to be a Washington, DC version of “Fargo,” which was mean and nasty and yet, somehow, funny as well.   Maybe it was Steve Buscemi.   Maybe it’s that DC is harder to lampoon than North Dakota, which in itself perhaps reveals our prejudices about country folk and city folk.   Whatever it is, “Burn After Reading” is only funny in parts, and the rest of the time is bizarre, unsettling, and harsh.

Recommended

• if you’d rather laugh at people than with them.
• For Brad Pitt’s performance.  Suggested double feature: “Jesse James” and then this.
• If “Fargo” is your favorite movie.
• If If you just can’t get comedy dark and savage enough.

Not Recommended

• if you’re looking for another “No Country for Old Men,” or another “O Brother Where Art Thou.”
• If you’re at all bothered by sudden, squeamish violence.
• If you’d rather see characters you can like and identify with.