Film

As a director, Eastwood takes a no-nonsense approach to narrative filmmaking; the same can’t always be said of his choice of material, however, which occasionally includes utter claptrap. The best thing you can say about this true-story account of 1920s SoCal social rot is that it isn’t as bad as something like Blood Work (2002) and doesn’t feature septuagenarians goofing around in space.

The tale itself is compelling: Switchboard operator Christine Collins (Jolie, in one-woman waterworks mode) comes home one afternoon to find that her boy, Walter, is gone. When the authorities reunite mother and child months later, Collins claims the lad isn’t her son. Thus begins a standoff between our distraught, dogged heroine and an LAPD captain (Donovan) who’s covering up the snafu. Meanwhile, another cop (Kelly) is called out to a local ranch and stumbles across something quite grisly.…

What follows is a hodgepodge of psychiatric snake-pit vignettes, police procedurals, Warners women’s pictures, serial-killer horror, not one but two courtroom dramas and an exposé on law-enforcement corruption. (Should you not care for the genre onscreen, just wait five minutes and another one will take its place.) Cramming an entire season of TCM programming into two-plus hours wouldn’t be so bad if everything else weren’t so hurly-burly; for a director who knows how to balance histrionics with a lack of sentimentality (see Mystic River), Eastwood is unable to modulate tone or performances here. No one’s perfect, not even our last totem of tough-yet-tender American cinema classicism. But that doesn’t excuse such erratic storytelling.