What is Clint Eastwood on? How does a director who’s easing into his 80s, and was once known as a sharp-shooting movie cliché, simply get better with every film? Changeling, like Letters from Iwo Jima before it, is a mature, thoughtful and sometimes brutal movie that casts a cold eye on the past while sending shivers through the present. Child abuse and child killing are subjects here, yet they’re seen through the prism of a bizarre real-life police corruption scandal from 1928 Los Angeles.

Meticulously researched by the former journalist J. Michael Straczynski, who lifted 90 per cent of the movie’s dialogue from court records, it tells the story of a single suburban mom called Christine Collins (Angelina Jolie) whose son Walter (Gattlin Griffith) was kidnapped from her LA home.

After months of fruitless searching, a young boy surfaced, claiming to be Walter. The Los Angeles Police Department, sniffing a media coup, publicly returned the boy to Collins and then, when she rejected this ersatz tyke (played with blank menace by Devon Conti), immediately became hostile, threatening her and finally removing her to LA County Hospital’s draconian psychiatric ward. Meanwhile the fate of the real Walter was slowly unfolding in the child-killing horror of the so-called Wineville Chicken Coop Murders.

The hook here is that Eastwood plays it all by the book. There are no artificial character arcs or comfortable resolutions. This is strictly reportage made flesh, and as such it has the beguiling rhythms of real life that, for once, don’t fit neatly into a three-act studio structure. Instead, the film ends after 141 minutes, just because it has to, and not because it should. It’s to Eastwood’s credit as a storyteller that he leaves the pot unsweetened.

Changeling, nonetheless, is a two-hander. For the director is crucially aided and abetted in excellence by Jolie, a performer of seemingly untapped depths who for too long has been happy to sell herself as a pout on legs. Here, the bee-stung lips are still centre frame, but the leering amour propre is gone, replaced by a ravaged emptiness punctuated by moments of fleeting, and then duly dashed, hope.

It’s hardly surprising that, in one of the movie’s final sequences, Jolie is shown listening intently to the 1935 Academy Awards ceremony on the wireless. It’s surely a scene setter for the 2009 Oscars, and a reminder to voters that, in case they hadn’t noticed, they’ve just seen the year’s first sure thing.

15, 141 minutes

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