This Is Not My Vancouver

I forget the movie I had paid to see that night, but I remember the trailer: a 1920s era Angelina Jolie in a cloche hat and red lipstick, looking this way and that; men getting out of cars, barking at her; her screaming at them, "This is not my son!" then looking away and biting a knuckle.

The trailer was for Changeling (2008), and it promised to appeal to those who loved Polanski's Chinatown (1974), but were more interested in following an attention-indifferent Frances Farmer (played by Jessica Lange) than an attention-seeking Jake Gittes (played by Jack Nicholson).

Directed by Clint Eastwood, Changeling is based on the true story of a woman whose son disappears, only to be returned to her by a corrupt Los Angeles Police Department -- but it's the wrong boy. When she complains, she is deemed crazy and institutionalized -- until a sympathetic cop finds evidence of a sexual predator and, with the help of a radio evangelist, she moves from courtroom to courtroom staring down those who had wronged her -- including the sexual predator, who, though he kidnapped and imprisoned her son, may not have killed him.

Changeling has all the ingredients of a great story -- but it is not a great film. Like a lot of Hollywood films over the past thirty-odd years, it has more than one ending, each one tacked on to the one before it: the sutured-ending, the schadenfreude ending and the open-ending.

The best part of the film, for this viewer, is the period recreation of late-1920s Los Angeles and, because the story takes us there for a brief but unnecessary instance, Vancouver (where most of the film's visual effects were generated), as pictured above. Just where in Vancouver that scene was shot has more to do with digital imaging than location scouting. Never before have I seen the North Shore Mountains so low on the horizon!