Changeling

I’m having trouble with Clint Eastwood and his direction lately, I liked Mystic River and Million Dollar Baby, but I’ve never had any desire to watch them again so maybe I didn’t like them as much as I thought I did, his World War Two pictures were ordinary, both of them, despite what the Academy has to say, to me he tries to hard to direct A-list dramas, the type that get nominated at the Oscars, the sort of film that Steven Spielberg is guilty of, that Ron Howard does, filled with the type of actors that win Oscars, unsurprisingly the early reviews that I read of Changeling suggested it was an attempt to score some gold from the academy, I didn’t want to pay to watch the film but since I was getting paid to watch it in my cinema job I took in a screening, Jolie is trying too hard from critical acclaim, the attempts by her and Eastwood at emotional weight fall into melodrama, the dialogue at times feels clunky and it is nowhere more evident in the film’s closing scenes, it is as if the screenwriter got lazier and lazier as he continued to write, I despair to read that the screenplay was never revised from the first draft, John Malkovich is the typical John Malkovich, it would have been better if he had been challenged, instead he yells a lot, for me at least Malkovich yelling always recalls the line “It's my head, Schwartz…”, but there are glimpses of the films Eastwood should be making and here I’ll refer to a review I read in Sight and Sound this month, to quote, “There’s a much better Eastwood movie inside this mediocre one struggling to get out, and it’s a neo-noir about the birth of America’s serial killer tradition”, this describes the film perfectly, and I think all of Eastwood’s latest films had a better film hidden somewhere in there, take the big budgets away from Clint, shake the oscar dreams from his head and I’m convinced we would see much better films.