the exchange Tagged Articles at Cinematical

As we've started to get our fair share of trailers for the coming prestige projects -- Frost/Nixon, The Soloist, Zack and Miri Make a Porno -- I was curious as to why we'd yet to get one for Clint Eastwood's period drama, Changeling, if it were set to open by the end of next month. Particularly after Kim's Cannes review, I wanted to get a proper glimpse beyond a brief clip...

Perhaps hearing my prayers or just tiring of my complaints, Yahoo! Movies saw fit to post the trailer (watch it after the jump as well), in which a young mother (Angelina Jolie) in 1928 Los Angeles finds herself standing up against a corrupt police department when her missing son is returned, or rather replaced by a different child altogether.

Even if the same piece of score hadn't been used in both of their trailers, I'd still have felt a need to draw a correlation between this and last October's missing-kids-and-corrupt-cops powerhouse, Gone Baby Gone (of course, it doesn't hurt that Amy Ryan shows up in both of them). From Eastwood's end comes a particular tinge of Mystic River, and so far as I'm concerned, all of those signs point to something substantial waiting for us when Changeling opens in limited release on October 31.

Oh look, a Clint Eastwood movie with an Oscar-friendly release date. That's new. Actually, it is relatively new, if you look over the man's directorial career. Sure, he's had a number of films come out in the fall time, but not with the same consistency we've seen since 2003, when Mystic River arrived in a few theaters on October 8 then went on to receive six Academy Award nominations the following winter.

Then in 2004, his Million Dollar Baby opened in limited release December 15 and went on to win four Oscars, including Best Picture and Best Director. Finally, in 2006, two of his films were released in the fall, Flags of Our Fathers in October and Letters from Iwo Jima in December. Both went on to receive Oscar recognition, the latter garnering major noms, such as Best Picture and Best Director.

This morning saw the world premiere of Changeling, Clint Eastwood's new film, which may even be called The Exchange -- reports are murky and muddled as to what, in fact, the final title of the film is. The plot revolves around mother Christine Collins (Angelina Jolie) whose son Walter goes missing; when police bring her found son back after weeks of fear and heartbreak, glad for a moment and then she's insistent: That's not my child.

Based on a true story, The Changeling is most definitely going to get Jolie an Oscar nomination, and may even earn her the win; aside from that, frankly, there's not much else in the movie. I know Kim liked Changeling a lot more than I did -- you can read her review at the link above; for me, it was just more of the massive, ham-fisted manipulation Clint Eastwood's brought to the screen in the over-praised, clumsy, phony Million Dollar Baby. There's no ambiguity in Changeling-- Jolie is a suffering, strong saint, the cops who have brought her the wrong child and refuse to acknowledge they've done wrong are moustache-twirling bad guys out of a silent film. And even when it's broad, it's bland -- there's no pulp or muck to it that might make it more than just a showcase for Jolie's misty-eyed maternal majesty on the big screen.

Clint Eastwood's Changeling (which may or may not be now known as The Exchange), is a riveting drama about a missing boy and the undying constancy of a mother's love. Angelina Jolie excels in a powerful performance as Christine Collins, whose nine-year-old son, Walter, disappeared in 1928. Five months later, police returned to her a boy they said was Walter; Christine alleged that the boy was not her son.

At the time, the Los Angeles police department was under considerable pressure due to the efforts of a Presbyterian minister, Reverend Gustav Briegleb (John Malcovich), to expose corruption within the police force. Captain Jones (Jeffrey Donovan), who heads up the investigation, doesn't particularly care whether the boy is or isn't Walter Collins; he has a publicity campaign to manage that's all about making himself look good, so he tries to convince Christine to accept the found boy as her son. When she fights back by going to the press, Jones has her committed to the psycho ward.