Changeling (2008)

Selasa, 04 November 2008

Changeling (2008)

Changeling (Clint Eastwood, 2008)

Changeling is Clint Eastwood's middling account of the struggles of Christine Collins (Angelina Jolie), a single mom who loses her son (Gattlin Griffith) and when the L. A. police reunited her with a different boy, protests and because of that, becomes hapless victim of the embattled police force's determination to salvage whatever integrity and reputation it has left under the inept and corrupt leadership of Chief Davis (Colm Feore). The film has the same somber and sober tone of Eastwood's post-Unforgiven (1999) Oscar baits (Mystic River (2003), Million Dollar Baby (2004), Flags of Our Fathers (2006), and Letters From Iwo Jima (2006)), where the pessimistic core dressed in multi-million dollar gloss of the films is often mistaken as aesthetic sophistication and thematic depth, thus garnering much popular and critical acclaim for what basically is heavy-handed humdrum.

Undoubtedly, like most of Eastwood's more recent features, Changeling is visually wonderful. Cinematographer Tom Stern paints this unideal Los Angeles with muted hues that seemingly allude to the moral and political condition of that era: hazy, fading, paling. 1920's-Los Angeles is impressively recreated, from the rows of suburban homes that house the newly affluent middle class to the decrepit abandoned farm in the outskirts of the city that becomes the setting of the horrendous massacre which is the core of the narrative. Populating these structures and edifices are citizens and transients who are occupied by their respective little businesses involving family and employment. The atmosphere of moral and political disarray is conveniently hidden by the bright Californian sun, until an impetus for its timely revelation occurs.

The film primarily concerns itself with Christine's own little entanglements which quickly transformed into the gargantuan task, the aforementioned impetus, of defeating the seemingly indestructible authority, something which she was volunteered for not by her own choosing but by fate and the repercussions of living in a corrupted city. J. Michael Straczynski, in his screenplay, is adamantly straightforward in forwarding the virtues of his headstrong heroine, but in so doing, branches into a myriad of unwieldy subplots and introduces a bevy of mono-dimensional side characters, including Rev. Gustav Briegleb (played with predictably boring enthusiasm by John Malkovich), a Presbyterian minister whose consistently forceful verbal attacks against the police and mental manipulation of Christine feels obnoxiously monomaniacal, Captain J. J. Jones (Jeffrey Donovan), the bad cop whose quintessential grimaces leave nothing to the imagination, and Gordon Northcott (Jason Butler Harner), the serial killer whose attempts at moral and psychological vagueness is more unconvincing than unsettling.

Eastwood's usually guileless and elegant storytelling seems inappropriate for Straczynski's pulpy material. There is a suspect air of reverence, facilitated by Straczynski's over-respectful tribute to his obscure protagonist, Eastwood's consistently competent although unremarkable direction, and Jolie's uncharacteristically quiet but effective turn as the perpetually suffering Christine Collins, that permeates throughout the film. It is an air of reverence that is particularly suffocating and this film, from its introduction of depicting Christine as timid yet industrious single mother (we see Christine at her workplace, well-loved, responsible, and diligently skating around her workplace before returning home to tend to her son) to the emotional trials she patiently goes through, delivers in unrelenting doses.

Changeling is a masterpiece to stubborn Eastwood-followers, gullible feminists, and connoisseurs of high melodrama and manipulative weepers. I also suspect fans of Lars Von Trier's Breaking the Waves (1996), Dancer in the Dark (2000), Dogville (2003), and Manderlay (2005), all of which depict women suffering through very cruel twists of fate, would be comfortable seeing Jolie bullied by the police into accepting a stranger as his son, dragged into the loony bin, and stripped and washed like filthy cattle, among others. To present-day cynics, or even those of us who have admired the simplicity of Eastwood's storytelling, Changeling is a disappointment that borders on being torture.

It's A Free World (2007)

Senin, 03 November 2008

It's A Free World (2007)

It's A Free World... (Ken Loach, 2007)

In Ken Loach's It's A Free World..., there are two generations of the working class that are separated not only by age but by their immense moral gap. Geoff (Colin Caughlin) is retired and spends his day taking care of his grandson. He lives comfortably with his wife, despite his acknowledgment of his limited financial capabilities, and goes about life with his head up high although his belt is tightened. He is representative of most of Loach's protagonists, those who maintain an adamantly dignified stance against the afflictions that plague the working class. Angie (surprisingly terrific newcomer Kierston Wareing), Geoff's daughter (and if we are to follow Geoff's logic, a severe disappointment) is in her early thirties, a single mother and has been switching jobs year after year and unable to find decent employment opportunities in a modern world of increasing wealth and diminishing integrities.

After being fired (presumably for violently reacting against the sexual advances of a male superior) from an employment agency that recruits immigrants for manual work in England, Angie returns to London and convinces Rose (Juliet Ellis), her flatmate, to start-up their own manpower agency in the backlot of a local pub. Angie's operations reflect her roots. Riding her motorcycle around town, recruiting overstaying aliens and convincing businessmen to provide work for her recruits, Angie's irresistable demeanor, consisting of a mix of unique confidence brewed from both desperation and years of economic and social struggle, would carry her entrepreneurial experiment to modest successes. She establishes rules at work (for example, she would not provide aliens without any papers employment), and in the process, protects whatever dignity and integrity from the probable repercussions of her chosen endeavor.

However, the capitalist world is not nearly as predictable as Angie thinks it is. Businesses fail. Employers become bankrupt and unable to pay wages. Commissions are unearned. Mobs of dissatisfied immigrants become unruly and her and her family's safety is compromised. Her rules are bent, first to favor an Iranian refugee who is desperate to find any job to feed his family, and later on, to finally complete her transformation from exploited to exploiter. No matter how Angie insists that there are borders to her profession, it is this uncomfortable meshing of her two roles (as a member of the exploited middle class and as the superior and empowered recruiter) in the bigger scheme of international economics and politics that forces her to choose which side she really belongs to: the abused, or the abuser.

To make matters worse, Angie's privilege is not her innate industry or other talents and skills, but the simple fact that the world also has arbitrary economic classes among nations, where Britain is hardly the working class as compared to its Eastern European neighbors whose citizens spend decades worth of their savings to gain entry to London, forced to be employed with meager wages and hardly any benefits, where promises of decent living and income is mutated into paranoia and nightmares of either being cramped into decrepit buses, factories, and inhumane working places or being chased out of the country by the immigrations police.

Loach's concern is hardly these impoverished illegal immigrants. Their stories have been told and retold by countless other filmmakers, almost always with the emotional efficiency of daytime soap. Loach pits his beloved middle class in the center of this contemporary world, where nations are interconnected by trade treaties, loosened borders, and easy communication. Although afflicted with the same working class problems (poverty, lack of professional recourse, and a youth that is being pushed to delinquency by lack of proper parenting), Angie's generation is provided with a pressing choice: of living the same lives as those who preceded them, or exploiting the more desperate and desolate members of the enlarged and supposedly freed world.