A trial

Holiday viewing, in Southampton's LEISURE WORLD (post as soon as I get my photos developed and scanned): Clint Eastwood's Changeling. Now, I'm not a fan - and the recent Sight & Sound headline 'greatest living American director' is a truly risible sentence - but this so much wierder than one might expect, a film that is one half a brutal, claustrophobic masterpiece and half a rather worthy procedural. The True Story of a woman whose child goes missing and is provided with another child by the LAPD, then locked up in the loony bin for denying said child to be her son, with a parallel subplot about the serial killing on a remote ranch of around 20 young boys, the film is held back by two things: one, that it is a true story, meaning Eastwood has to be faithful to the actual events, and two, the director's obvious need to impress upon the audience that evil will not ultimately triumph. This is laudable in a person, but a huge flaw in a director, as the relentless first half builds up a truly chilling landscape. Sure, L.A and its Police Department as the site for some sort of founding myth of evil is well-trodden ground, but Changeling impresses through the details that make up this world, this city where every possible means of escape is blocked. 

Angelina Jolie, clearly rather physically miscast as a flapper, gives in places a compellingly awkward performance, her discomfort and deeply peculiar physiognomy convincing far more than her Oscar-courting heroics in the last third. A sinister police captain and an activist radio priest (a brilliantly odd John Malkovich) are given accents that now sound strange and alien, presumably based on recordings of their historical characters: angular, arch accents which have disappeared from America, either the tortured cadences of the recent immigrant or the bullish precision of the old WASP elite. Faces are weirdly important throughout, with an actor playing a hangman seemingly chosen for his grotesquely medieval, Brueghel-esque features. Meanwhile, the serial killer subplot is grimly surreal rather than gratuitous, implying unimaginable horror via empty landscapes and shadows as opposed to showing the thing itself. For an hour this is a truly unnerving film, its disturbing power only increased by the director's evident humanist intentions. But by the end the effect is as if The Trial concluded with Joseph K not only discovering who was telling lies about him but, watching the advocate and the whipper being tried by an avenging court. Still, the clothes are fantastic.