Changeling (Clint Eastwood, 2008)

In one sense, Dirty Harry comes full circle like a snake biting its tail, with a piece which in no uncertain terms presents the LAPD of the ‘20s as a bastion of corruption and intimidation. Meanwhile, in a wider thematic context, we’re still with Eastwood’s perennial loner struggling against the injustice of a prejudiced system. In this case, it’s Angelina Jolie, a single mother whose child vanishes. The police and state apparatus, amidst much self-congratulatory fanfare, duly present her with another child and pressure her into accepting the stranger as her own. When she repeatedly denies parenthood of the boy, the irritation of the police turns to ire and then results in her committal to a mental institution.

The sheer insanity of a set-up in which the authorities, being experts, assert their identification of the child over the febrile female capacity of the actual mother, would be cartoonishly unfeasible without the certitude that we’re dealing with real-life events here. Accepting their factuality gives Eastwood a strong hand indeed with which to make a double assault on both self-serving bureaucracy and the disenfranchisement of women. 
But adherence to the facts of the case also pushes the film structurally badly off course: everything is effectively resolved with an hour still to go, and then we’ve just got a succession of stolid epilogues to wade through. And, as for Jolie, irrespective of her public image as a serial maternalist, and Oscar-nominated though she was – presumably for the feat of working outside gunplay or vamping – she’s an ill fit for the role of a vulnerable everywoman, too glam and too steely: it’s all too easy to envisage her pushed over the edge and beating the crap out of her institutional oppressors.

5/10