Film review: Changeling

** (15)

DIRECTED BY: CLINT EASTWOOD
STARRING: ANGELINA JOLIE, JOHN MALKOVICH, MICHAEL KELLY

CLINT Eastwood's rather baffling reputation as America's most respected director is likely to continue with Changeling, a stately and stilted period melodrama that seems to be gunning so hard for Academy Award nominations that it even gives a shameless shout-out to the Oscars in its final moments.

Starring Angelina Jolie, Changeling is based on an incredible true story and announces itself as such in the opening titles, presumably because what follows is so hard to believe that were it to occur in a fiction film it would instantly be dismissed as bad writing.

Yet its origins also give Eastwood licence to present his star less as a character with real human emotions than as a cinematic symbol of celestial suffering. Barely a scene goes by in which his over-lit evocation of 1920s Los Angeles doesn't confer saintly status upon Jolie, making it impossible to get lost in a film that requires our absolute absorption for it to work. Unlike her performance as Mariane Pearl in last year's A Mighty Heart, Jolie doesn't disappear into her role here, mainly because Eastwood won't let her: he's made it her show, even though the story he's telling and the way he's chosen to tell it suggests it's about much bigger things.

Jolie plays Christine Collins, a single mother living in a middle-class part of Los Angeles. She works as a supervisor in a telephone exchange. It is almost exclusively an all-female work environment, which Eastwood uses to flag up the conflicting societal attitude to women of the period. On the one hand, Los Angeles in 1928 seems like a thoroughly modern city where women such as Christine, whose husband ran off the moment she announced she was pregnant, can be independent and have a reasonable standard of living. On the other, there still exists a venal and thoroughly regressive attitude towards women simmering away just below the surface, ready to erupt at any moment.

The first hints of the latter come when Christine, persuaded to work for a few hours on her day off, has to leave her nine-year-old son, Walter, home alone. When she returns later that day he's not there and, because he's not the sort of child to disobey his mother or wander off on his own, she frantically searches the neighbourhood then promptly calls the police, only to be patronisingly informed that no help will be forthcoming because he'll probably wander home soon.

This initial suggestion that Christine doesn't know her own son takes on a horrifically literal quality months later when the Los Angeles Police Department announce that they've found him. With a huge media fanfare they reunite Christine with Walter. There's just one problem: the boy is not her son and, despite her protestations, in her stunned state she's persuaded to take him home because "he has nowhere else to go".

Which is kind of the problem with the film. Eastwood doesn't play the "is she/isn't she?" deluded card here. Almost from the off he leaves us in little doubt that Christine is telling the truth, supplying her with an array of experts – a dentist, a teacher, a crusading pastor (John Malkovich) – to back up her own indisputable physical evidence against this boy being her son.

Instead the director uses this fact to show how easily the LAPD are able to brand Christine hysterical, getting her banged up in a sanatorium that seems to be populated entirely with women who have been problematic to the corrupt, rotting institution policing the streets of Los Angeles with an almost frontier-like approach to justice.

A sinister police captain played by Jeffrey Donovan is the boo-hiss villain determined to silence her, primarily because his solution to the mystery of her missing child has got his incompetent department off the hook. Yet Eastwood's segueing into such James Ellroy territory isn't particularly compelling, coming off as a rather dull copy of LA Confidential bolted on to a film that would once have been classified – and not derisively – as a "women's picture".

The big surprise is that much of this is resolved by the mid-point, which is when Eastwood drops in his big narrative twist (something that, amazingly, wasn't even hinted at in the otherwise explain-all trailer). The less you know going in the better; suffice it to say that for a good 30 minutes or so the film suddenly snaps into life as the focus moves away from Jolie and onto a parallel investigation led by the LAPD's apparently one good cop that may be connected with the disappearance of her son.

Taking on the hard-boiled conventions of the Warner Bros movies of the period, it's taut, gripping stuff, as good as anything in Eastwood's Mystic River. Alas, even this slackens off, leading once more into Christine's noble crusade, with Eastwood repeatedly giving Jolie big triumph over adversity moments as he drags the film out to incorporate not one but two court cases, an execution and big dramatic moment of hope.

Before he finally lets it peter out in stately fashion, however, he signals what might be the real purpose of the film by having Christine listen to a radio broadcast of the 1935 Academy Awards nominations. As the Best Actress winner – Claudette Colbert for It Happened One Night – is announced, Eastwood and Jolie allow Christine nearly her only smile in the film.

Howler of the week: FLAWLESS

CAKED in Latex to age her 40 years, Demi Moore looks like she's wandered in from a George Romero zombie flick in the modern-day bookends of 1960s-set heist movie Flawless. But the real horror is to come in the final moments, when the film descends into an outrageously treacly montage of shots detailing all the world-saving good she has been performing since ripping off her employers.