Clint Eastwood's "The Exchanged" had its title unceremoniously changed from "The Changeling" two days ago. Maybe the studio was afraid the teen crowd would think it was a horror movie, but having watched it at 8:30 a.m. Croisette time, I'm not sure who the audience for this even is. Angelina Jolie completists who want to watch her express maternal panic with newfound insights? Los Angeles history buffs looking for a precision recreation of the City of Angels in 1928? Folks wanting a grueling tale of kidnapping, serial child killing, and the venality of the LAPD?
Jolie plays Christine Collins, a single mother whose 9-year-old boy goes missing one day. After two months, the LAPD -- embattled by charges of corruption at all levels -- produces a child. Problem is, Collins maintains it's not her child. Before the movie's over, she'll have been railroaded into a mental institution straight out of "The Snake Pit," befriended a helpful whore (Amy Ryan), been abetted by a fire-breathing local minister (John Malkovich!), and taken on the entire civic structure of greater Los Angeles. There's also a subplot about a creepy mass murderer out in the desert (Jason Butler Harner channeling Peter Lorre in "M").
This is based closely on real events, although "The Exchanged" doesn't mention that anywhere in the movie - I hear Eastwood wants the story to stand on its own. The problem is that it doesn't; without that admission of actuality, it's a grim tour through heartbreaking loss, madness, bureaucratic fascism, and the torture of innocents. Even with the knowledge that "it actually happened," you never feel a compelling reason for sitting through the film: it's trying to be too many things at once. Jolie is very good in some scenes and too carefully overwrought in others, and the ultimate open-endedness of the story is frustrating after 140 minutes of uneven drama. "The Exchanged" is a "Zodiac" that also wants to tell a tale of gutsy heroism in the classic Hollywood tradition, and the two aspects don't square.
The production design is pitch perfect though, even without Eastwood's longstanding PD aboard -- the late Henry Bumstead. (There's a diner in the film named "Bummy's" in his honor.) There are some defenders of the film to be heard in the hallways of the press section -- Scott Foundas of the L.A. Weekly, notably -- but most people seemed to come out feeling that Clint has aimed for another "Mystic River" and missed.
Another lumpy American film played last night: James Gray's "Two Lovers," with Joaquin Phoenix as a Brooklyn schlub torn between a nice Jewish girl (Vinessa Shaw) and a crazy blond neighbor (Gwyneth Paltrow). The moral's pretty simple: shiksas are trouble. They love Gray in France, perhaps because his dour crime-inflected dramas ("The Yards," "We Own the Night") feature dialogue that sounds ponderous in English but archetypal with French subtitles. "Two Lovers" shows him loosening up a little, and I enjoyed the movie reasonably as a enjoyable romantic/fatalistic genre wallow. Couple of points, though: the cast are about ten years too old for their roles, Shaw is too chicly gorgeous to be believable as a Brighton Beach lonelyhearts (Betsy Blair in "Marty" would have been about right), and the final scenes provide a feel-good closure that the rest of the movie just hasn't earned. Phoenix's Leonard should have wound up like Edward G. Robinson in an old Fritz Lang film -- totally hosed. But as they say in "The Exchanged," "People like happy endings."
