Angelina Jolie in 'Changeling': DVD of the week

Angelina Jolie plays a destoyed mother in Clint Eastwood's intriguing but depressing Changeling.

• It got her an Oscar nomination, but the role of Christine Collins in Clint Eastwood’s true-crime drama is a peculiar one for Angelina Jolie. This single mother in late-Twenties Los Angeles came home to find her son missing, and became the victim of a spectacular fraud by the LAPD: they tried to foist the wrong boy on her, then sent her to the loony bin when she cried foul.
• Jolie’s portrayal is a strangely coy and muted star turn – she beats her breast occasionally, throws the odd plate at the wall, cries “I want my son back” at least once in every scene, but otherwise doesn’t put up quite the fight you’re hoping for. Jolie disappears from view when a crusading pastor (John Malkovich, ranting for a cause) takes up her case against police corruption, and the movie becomes a jammed-together, fitfully compelling procedural about the fate of her real son, mounted by Eastwood with exaggerated contrasts in both the acting and lighting schemes.
• The world that’s out to get Christine is stark and male and takes no prisoners – we get this. But the mother’s hope Eastwood sets against it is indifferently written and played, and I’m not sure he quite realises how depressing his ending is. File under intriguing failure, with hints right the way through of the furious exposé it might have been.