Hello darlings.
Last week I rented Clint Eastwood’s “Changeling” (2008) through Netflix. I started it a little before midnight on a night when I really needed to be asleep by twelve to be intelligible for work at school the next morning. I had a subject coming in for the study I’m working on, and had to SCID (Structured Clinical Interview for DSM Disorders) and SIDP (Structured Interview for DSM-IV Personality [Disorders]) him, a process that can take anywhere from 45 minutes to 2 hours or more. I wanted to be sharp.
So starting this movie was a terrible idea.
Really, from my little experience with his films, I should’ve known that starting *any* Eastwood-directed movie when I wanted to get to sleep on time was a terrible idea. I’m still catching my breath from “Mystic River” (2003). Eastwood is truly a formidable director, especially when he’s directing movies about bad things happening to people’s children.
So I started the movie, thinking I would watch maybe a half hour of it and finish the rest the next day. Instead, once immersed in this film, I wouldn’t have dreamt of cutting it off. This is a movie worth losing sleep over.
“Changeling” is based on the true story of a single woman in Los Angeles whose 9-year-old son disappeared from their home in 1928. The subsequent nation-wide search for Walter Collins ended when his mother, Christine, was presented with a child the Los Angeles Police Department was convinced was her son. He was not. In spite of her protestations and mounting evidence that the LAPD had, in fact, retrieved the wrong child, the police were resolute in their contention that Christine Collins was incorrect, to the point of placing her in a psychiatric hospital for her insubordination.
Angelina Jolie plays the heroine of the film. She spends much of the movie with stylish hats pulled low over her eyes, largely obscuring her face—a decision I theorize was made in part because otherwise she is so distractingly the stunning, controversial, and strange Angelina Jolie—and yet the performance that comes boiling out of her is so riveting it steals the breath. In spite of her character’s ultimate heroism, she makes you feel her gut-wrenching despair, her nauseating powerlessness in the face of infuriatingly stubborn, stupid men whose misogyny so thickens their skulls that they would rather put a woman in a psychiatric institution than believe, even in the face of incontrovertible evidence, she might be right.
Oh she is so good.
She is delightfully accompanied in the film by the ever-watchable, ever-bizarre John Malkovich, who I honestly think is incapable of being bad in anything. As a Presbyterian minister and radio evangelist, he imbues each word with a taught, righteous rage seemingly meant to convert each staccato consonant into a little knife to be driven into the heart of his foes—in this case, the horrifyingly corrupt Los Angeles Police Department of the 1920’s (not to be confused with the horrifyingly corrupt LAPD of the 1950’s, as portrayed in the wonderful “L.A. Confidential” (1997), for example).
The movie follows this story’s path through places of chilling, startling darkness, far beyond even the walls of the hospital that housed Christine Collins—places that seem too terrible to be based in fact, and yet were real. Part of the reason I didn’t get to bed before 3 am was that I promptly hopped on Wikipedia and Google to verify the events depicted in the movie—it was THAT GOOD. Eastwood guides his viewer’s gaze, firmly yet without undue brutality, toward some of the most troubling abilities of humankind with a solemnity and clarity few directors possess. I obviously don’t want to ruin the latter part of the movie, but suffice it to say it’s both surprising and morbidly fascinating in a way I haven’t seen perhaps since “Capote” (2005).
Given the role of institutions of mental health in this movie, I’m obligated to make mention of the fact that I am continually disappointed by the history of my chosen profession. For such a young field, psychology has already done a number of pretty ugly things. Partnering up with a corrupt police department to file away perfectly sane women whose “affliction” consists merely of mouthing off to men in positions of authority is unsettling and awful, but unfortunately not the worst chapter in psychological history. See also: lobotomies. Or forcibly sterilizing the mentally retarded. Or conditions in state-run mental hospitals during World War II. And that’s just the shit we’ve pulled in America. Don’t even get me started on how mental health looks in less-developed nations, like Viet Nam, which I visited recently. Psychology has come a long way, but there’s still a long road ahead of us before we strike a graceful balance between protecting human liberty and dignity and effectively and consistently healing the mentally ill.
In conclusion, I gave “Changeling” a 5. Shocking, I’m sure.
In other, less depressing psychological news: I’ve read like 12 pages of my book on meta-analysis, and have learned that I can now consider myself a synthesist. Oooooh. Flashy, I know. Even though I have much more reading and work ahead of me, I’m relieved to have finally accomplished something toward completing my thesis.
I’ve also gotten to interview two subjects in the last week or so (not just the one I failed to get sufficient sleep for), which is great because a) I get to count that time as clinical hours for internship, b) I want to be a psychologist, so I like talking to human beings about their problems, and c) I have a tendency to love my participants/clients merely because they show up and talk to me about their lives (but also because they almost always reveal some unusual, special loveliness in their possession). So that was nice.
And with that, I’ll sign off. Thanks for reading, whoever you are.
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