Hollywood has few happy stories to tell about L.A. It is presented as a city that has been distorted and twisted into something ugly by the convex glass of the lenses that forever studies it. The media attention that it’s police force, it’s industries and it’s residents are subjected to have, again and again, in films like L.A. Confidential, For Your Consideration and Who Framed Roger Rabit (OK, maybe not that one) shown L.A. to be an immoral Gomorrah-like nest of sin.
In film L.A. is a place where nothing is as it seems and a cover up is never far away. Changeling is about one such cover-up, in this case a mother loses her son and reports him missing, within a campaign of PR spin the L.A. police return a boy to her but it’s not her son. She then struggles to convince the police and the media that the wrong boy has been returned to her.
Angelina Jolie, who plays the mother, puts an amazing performance in and is believable throughout. Her performance does this true story real justice; it is almost wholly responsible for the viewer not abandoning all suspension of disbelief at all. Although the events are almost totally faithful to the truth, they seem so outrageous that they beggar belief. Keep in mind when your disbelief get the better of you though, that this is L.A. and the lens doesn’t distort that much.
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