The Changeling

Using as its base the true story of a 1928 kidnapping in California, Clint Eastwood directs a complex morality tale. The film is so unconvincingly and one-dimensionally acted that it often becomes tortuous to watch. There is a rigorous mono-dimensionality to the acting that at first appears distracting, perhaps even unintentional, and then gives way to the emergence of the story on a level that is beyond "realism." By keeping representation witnin the boundary of surface, the film is freed to journey into depth that is both psychological and emotional.

A nine year old boy, Walter, is abducted during his mother’s workday (no father in the picture). Perhaps loved, he is clearly not adequately cared for. The plot is set in motion when—after a nation-wide police search—the boy has supposedly been found in the Midwest and returned home, except that he’s a very different same age child. The highly staged sentimental reunion receives wide press coverage as an instance of shining police work, a stellar triumph for an L.A. Police department known to be wildly corrupt and desperate for the slightest public relations boon. Clearly they know the boy is not her son and yet are confounded by her unwillingness to participate in the illusion.

Thus begins the mother’s quest to prove this boy is a changeling, delivered to her for an unknown reason. The maternal love she claims toward her own child now manifests as hate for this stranger; the hate, in turn, renders her an enemy to the police who—with the cooperation of the equally corrupt psychiatric establishment—have her committed to a mental hospital to silence her voice of protest.

Against this background appears the first detail calling her motives into question. All she need do is sign a statement confirming that her upset was a stress-related reaction to her anguish and she will be released from custodial detention to care for the boy. She refuses to tell this lie. What has happened is that her quest to find her biological child is trumped by the need to be truthful, not to her purpose but to literal reality. Her pseudo-heroic energy has shifted from the demand that her son be found to the defiance of authority. She has, in fact, gotten in her own way.

This moment in the film when who she is becomes suspect is the first clear signal that a parallel story is unfolding to that of a mother’s anguished search for her lost son. Will it be seen that her investment in the way she comes across is not that dissimilar to the police force’s focus on their role as public protectors?

Meanwhile, the diverse pieces related to the kidnapping begin to come clearly into view. Walter is one in a series of young boys picked up by a psychopathic, psychotic man and his terrorized young cousin. Perhaps some of the boys are sexually abused; certainly all are ultimately brutally murdered as the killer seeks momentary release from the inner voices of his own fear. The young cousin reveals what has transpired to an at first incredulous police lieutenant, substantiating his tale as he leads them to where he was forced to bury the dismembered body parts. We understand that Christina’s Walter is among the victims, learning later that his participation in a desperate escape attempt allowed another of the captive children to break free.

Fatherless Walter somehow had instinctive access to the heroic masculine, returning, after breaking free himself, to the aid of a fleeing comrade caught on a fence. In remarkable contrast to the stubborn pride of his mother, he acts fearlessly, decisively, self-sacrificially. Is the man he might have grown into someone his mother could have valued or would she have needed to devalue him as he matured?

When the moment comes for the identified and obviously guilty perpetrator of these grisly murders to come to trial (even as in an adjacent courtroom there is a disciplinary hearing about the attempted police cover-up), it is suddenly apparent that Gordon Northcott, the sadistic killer, and Christine Collins, the bereaved mother, are destined to meet and interact. Gordon, with the gram of accurate perception that often accompanies psychosis, grasps that Christine is the one person among the spectators who has experienced being cast aside, dehumanized as crazy—in her dealings with the police and her hospitalization. He intuitively grasps that the dark underbelly of daily reality always focuses on finding scapegoats so that the ordinary ‘righteous’ world can congratulate itself on the return of order.

Christine has no awareness of the piece of shared destiny Gordon describes. Two years later, on the eve of his execution, she is the one person he wants to see. But her decision to comply with the request is not in order to interact with him—to actually meet—but to get a definitive chapter-closing answer about her son’s death. As she fails to be present in good faith, he turns away and will give her nothing.

One is pulled back to the day of the kidnapping, when mother had promised her son a trip to the movies, only to go to work instead and schedule the outing for the next day. Had she looked in her son’s eyes, seen his disappointment and his dawning recognition that she would never perceive his hunger in the moment, the tragic sequence need not have occurred. Clint Eastwood, we marvel, has ever so subtly planted the seed of her inability to see the other, foreshadowing the film’s thrust.

Three years after Gordon is hanged, there is a coda. The boy who escaped that night with Walter’s help surfaces to complete the tale; he wants to be able to return to his mother. A final opportunity presents itself for Christine to see that in the life of this boy the survival of her son continues. Yet, as with the changeling child seven years before, she cannot transcend the limitations about what is or is not hers. A sad truth concerns her inability to love; at the end she is reduced to a false and unfeeling sense of hope, unable to stay with the present emotion.

In the film’s final shot, she crosses a heavily-trafficked street, oblivious to what is around her and to her own danger. Hers is a version of the plugged-in contemporary psyche, hearing only the music it has chosen and shutting out the outside. Eastwood has found a vehicle for displaying the contemporary psyche closed in on itself. By contrast to Kowalski in Eastwood’s Gran Torino who is transformed by experience, Christine is impenetrable to experience, as un-alive as the scorchingly 2-dimensional depiction Angelina Jolie embodies.

Moving from hopelessness to hope, she manages to convey that there is no difference between them. Both are mere fantasy substitutes for her unlived life.