Clint's world

For an old bugger, director Clint Eastwood is pretty prolific. He’s cranking out two movies at a time these days, and the Eastwood factory shows no signs of slowing down, despite any economic downturn or people’s finicky buying habits. After bagging a second Best Director Oscar for Million Dollar Baby, then sending out a twofer of Flags of our Fathers and Letters from Iwo Jima in 2006, last year’s offerings were Gran Torino and Changeling.

Gran Torino is the one that’s doing big box office now, a small movie about aging Korean War vet and widow Walt Kowalski (Clint) and his Hmong neighbors (the Hmong are refugees from Laos, Cambodia, Vietnam and China who sought a home in the US at the end of Vietnam War, as helpful Hmong teen Sue Lor, played by Ahney Her, explains in the movie). With his American flag waving proudly from his well-swept porch, Clint’s craggy Walt at first embodies the stereotypical bigot, despising his Asian neighbors; then he embodies the stereotypical mentor (shades of Karate Kid?), protecting the family as his own, especially the shy son Thao (Bee Vang), who’s being hassled by Hmong gangbangers. At first glance, this gang angle plays like Boyz N The Asian Hood, and seems clichéd. But the script (by Nick Shenk) is more concerned with characters then calibers. There’s an inevitable showdown in Gran Torino, and the kind of insulated environment (cops are no help whatsoever) that reminds you of the Old West. But Clint’s Walt takes a more reflective turn than his usual shoot-‘em-up movies might have demanded.

Eastwood, of course, is an icon of screen violence, with a fistful of characters under his belt (the Dirty Harry and Sergio Leone movies, High Plains Drifter, Outlaw Josey Wales, etc.) who squint, look pissed off, and act accordingly.

But somewhere along the line, Eastwood seems to have reexamined the question of violence in his work, or maybe even Hollywood itself. In film after film, perhaps starting with Unforgiven (1992), he’s taken a familiar Hollywood genre and flipped it on its ear, questioning our easy assumptions about the Western (Unforgiven, though it still has a big payback scene), the boxing film (Million Dollar Baby, with its pro-euthanasia message) and the World War II flick (Flags of Our Fathers). He may be the most subversive mainstream director out there, employing his iconic status to unexpected ends.

In truth, Eastwood takes a lot of guff as a director. Despite his accolades, many (younger) viewers see him as a craggy old relic from the past (though Gran Torino, with its young cast, is more accessible to the Cineplex crowd). But I’ve often enjoyed his movies, and if his cragginess results in a body of work not unworthy of being mentioned in the same breath as Don Siegel’s or John Huston’s, then I’ll take him over a pack of Ron Howards any day. (Among the other “actors turned directors,” Robert Redford also turns in fine work on occasion). Gran Torino, with a theme song sung by Clint himself to — yup — the classic muscle car in the closing credits, is far more affecting and elegiac than a simple revenge flick has any right to be.

While the Oscars this year pondered the curious case of Benjamin Button, a man whose physical mutation intertwines with history Forrest Gump-style, Eastwood looks at a quite another transformation in Changeling, in which single mom Christine Collins (Angelina Jolie) tries to uncover who pulled a switcheroo on her missing kid.

It’s 1928 Los Angeles, and Christine works at a telephone company, roller-skating between switchboard operators by night and tending to her 10-year-old son Walter by day. When Walter goes missing one day (after Christine reluctantly fills in for a sick co-worker), she must turn to the LA police to track down her son. The case stalls for months, until the cops turn up with a kid that roughly matches Walter’s description. But Christine is not convinced.

The film largely belongs to Jolie, who gives her character a lot of “moxie” (I think that was the expression back in the day) despite having to raise a kid without a dad and being tossed into a mental institution at one point (shades of Girl, Interrupted). Her face is luminous, her skin milky-white, her hair wavy and curly: she clearly radiates that old-Hollywood glamour, perhaps a bit too much for a simple telephone operator. But Jolie brings, as she usually does when feeling sufficiently moved, quavering emotion to the role, and she is an easy match for Jeffrey Donovan’s unhelpful Capt. Jones LAPD and John Malkovich’s radio crusader, Rev. Gustav Briegleb (who sports a wavy and distracting wig). At first, Jolie seems a pushover, persuaded by police to take her child back on “a trial basis” even though she has serious doubts from the get-go. The LAPD, we learn, has serious PR problems — the kind involving police brutality, drug running and general Nazi-ish tendencies that readers of James Ellroy are well familiar with. Finding a missing mom’s kid would do the department a world of good.

Still, Christine won’t buy it. The kid is three inches shorter than Walter, for one thing. Her obstinacy runs afoul of what we clearly see as a male-dominated authoritarian society, one in which the word of man is de facto superior to the “emotional” whims of the female. Not only the police system but medical science is scornful of “feminine logic” in Changeling.

Here, as in other Eastwood films, a familiar Hollywood genre — the cop film — gets a savage workover, and some of Changeling’s images are worthy of John Ford (the scene with a distraught kid and a shovel is particularly affecting; a good example of action carrying emotion, something the talky, unimpressive Revolution Road failed to understand on a basic level).

But one of Eastwood’s failings is length. He’s good with the police procedural, tracking the case and revealing the threads of Walter’s strange disappearance (based on true events, by the way); but he packs his movie with too much story, branching out into a Snake Pit subplot set in a mental institution largely populated by women who dared say “no” to the police. It’s one plot too many for this movie. It all adds to Eastwood’s indictment of a patriarchal society (the LAPD being a prime and vivid example). But ‘ol Dirty Harry tends to lay down each brick in the wall with deathly deliberation; his movies don’t exactly move at a jackrabbit pace. Still, they are intelligent and interesting to watch.

If there’s a fire invigorating this movie, though, it’s Jolie. She was worthy of an Oscar, but Kate Winslet’s smoldering Holocaust turn bagged the trophy instead. Still, it’s nice to see Angelina doing something besides looking hot and serpentine onscreen again. Not that she doesn’t do those two things really, really well.

A changeling, by the way, is a child snatched and replaced with another by wood fairies, according to folklore. Fairies prized kids for all kinds of nefarious purposes. The evil that lurks in Eastwood’s movie also takes place largely off-screen, in some dark and forbidding place. We are left to ponder that evil for most of the movie, and it’s a credit to the script that the revelations that come don’t fall short of our worst imaginings.