Changeling

Tonight for some cheap entertainment a few of my friends and I decided to take advantage of the $2 movie tickets offered to Colorado Mountain College students every other Friday night. We decided to go see Clint Eastwood's Changeling, and all I can say is Wow. Walking into the theater I had no idea what the movie was about, just that it was starring Angelina Jolie. I expected another film where she plays a sexed up woman who knows how to handle guns and fight better than her co-starring men. Considering it took me a half hour to figure out that the pale, innocent looking woman with bright red lipstick was Jolie, I was in for quite a surprise.

The movie starts out in the 1920s with a loving mother, Christine, who returns home from work one night to find her son missing. Months later the LAPD claims to have found her son, but when she arrives at the train station, to her dismay it's not him. I don’t want to give away the entire thing, but due to her publicly embarrassing the police department, they throw her into an insane asylum to shut her up. She is brutally abused by a system in which she has no control. Soon, thanks to a Reverend who devotes his life to fighting against corrupt cops, more evidence is found proving her case and they are forced to release her. The rest of the movie follows the corrupt moves of the police department and Christine’s brave battle against them.

It was one of those movies where you ended up thinking. You weren’t happy or sad at the ending, just wowed at the history of our country. I immediately started thinking about the case this woman had. It was very serious, yet tried in front of a city council, not the State or the Supreme Court. It set precedents for generations to come and helped fix a failed system. Yet here we are in today's society where a woman can sue McDonald's because she spilled coffee on her lap and it burned her. A man can sue a beer company because he didn't have as much fun as the people in the commercials did. Why do people do this? It makes a mockery of our system, which as presented in this movie already has enough struggles going on. Do we sue people for dumb reasons because we can't find anything better to do? Has our idea of a serious situation become so dumbed down and diluted that we need to run to the court house every time we slip on a patch of ice? Or maybe these people are greedy and want money, so they find ways to use the system to their advantage, just like the dirty cops in the film.

That last paragraph is by no means what the movie is about, but in one way or another, that’s where my thoughts ended up. Overall I’d recommend this movie as one of my top picks if you’re in the mood for something thought provoking. It’s right up there with Gone Baby Gone. I promise I didn’t give away too much, there are a lot of twists that I left out and my synopsis didn’t come close to giving it justice.