WHEN THOSE WHO “PROTECT AND SERVE” INSTEAD EXPLOIT AND ABUSE:

PRIDE AND GLORY and CHANGELING

By Joel Johnson

It hadn’t been a plan to see these two films during the same weekend and essentially as back-to-back film experiences, but that is what happened. If it had been part of a plan, we probably would have decided to see Bottle Shock as a buffer between Pride and Glory and Changeling instead of seeing it first. Bottle Shock, an effervescent little film with a fruity bouquet and a laidback aftertaste, is based on the true story of how a bunch of dreamy Napa Valley vintners took the challenge of a Paris-based English wine connoisseur to compete in a blind taste test against elite French wines. It could have served as an effective palate-cleanser for the expresso-infused grain alcohol concoctions from Directors Clint Eastwood and Gavin O’Connor. Police corruption is the focus of both Eastwood’s Changeling and O’Connor’s Pride and Glory.

Pride and Glory is a contemporary story centered on the Tierney family-patriarch Francis Sr. (Jon Voight) and brothers Raymond (Edward Norton) and Francis Jr. (Noah Emmerich) along with brother-in-law Jimmy Egan (Colin Farrell). The Tierney family bleeds the deep blue of New York’s Finest and knows the code of protecting its own, backward and forward. Raymond and his brother Francis are each facing the end of the relationship with their wives. Raymond is just weeks shy of his divorce from his African American wife Tasha (Carmen Ejogo) becoming final-a divorce set in motion by his loyalty to his police brethren who have victimized African Americans. Francis Jr.’s wife, Abby (Jennifer Ehle), is waging a losing battle against cancer. Jimmy and apple of her father’s eye Megan (Lake Bell) have a seemingly idyllic life with three young tykes, but there’s something very rotten in “the city that never sleeps,” and Jimmy is up to his regulation crew cut in the foul mess. A raid on a Puerto Rican drug dealer ends in a bloodbath with four dead cops along with a couple of the dealer’s hangers-on. Bullied by his father into accepting the assignment to investigate the debacle, Raymond uncovers that the purported target of the raid may have been tipped off by a police officer. This is just the first loose string to pull in this tangled and blood-spattered skein of a yarn.

O’Connor and his coscreenwriter Joe Carnahan bounce the audience around, providing snippets of what is going on with his army of actors in their various incarnations of good cop, bad cop, bystander, and criminal. It’s not easy to keep up with all that is going on, but the script does provide the opportunity for the actors to display some superb acting. Norton, Voight, Emmerich, Farrell, and Ehle deliver fine character studies of human beings under extraordinary stress and deeply conflicted. This is what draws the audience in and keeps us watching in morbid fascination as the story unfolds. It is a particularly ugly story. While it is always shocking and disappointing when those whom we trust to uphold our laws and protect us from harm decide to betray that trust to seek personal benefit from their position, this film portrays the police-turned-criminals as fully as vicious and despicable as the vilest criminals. There is one particular scene involving Farrell that raises the question as to whether there is any line of misconduct his Jimmy is not willing to step over. This is not the kind of film from which one leaves the theater whistling a happy tune or even just with one’s faith in our civic compact fully intact. The film powerfully hits the gut with the truth that the space between upholder of the law and lawbreaker is both slippery and narrow.

Clint Eastwood’s Changeling also delivers its own gut-wrenching blows. This is in part because it deals with the darkest and most horrific nightmare for any parent: Your child is missing. However, that is just the beginning of a devastatingly grotesque private hell for single parent Christine Collins (Angelina Jolie) in 1928 Los Angeles. She initially finds the police reluctantly diffident in offering help and then finds them all too eager to hold an ostentatious photo opportunity replacing her son Walter with an ersatz Walter. Her protests that the boy brought to her is not her son are swept aside and ignored. Her hell will include side trips to a psychiatric hospital and then to death row at San Quentin. It will, ultimately, last her entire life, as her son’s precise fate is never known, though a fate no parent would ever want to consider is strongly suggested.

The most awful and most powerful thing about Changeling is that it is a true story of what happened to a real woman and her son. It seems almost inconceivable that a mother stricken with the cruelest of losses would find herself deceived by the police-those we trust to redress such cruelty-and then railroaded as mentally unstable for questioning the deception. First time screenwriter and former reporter J. Michael Straczynski has sought to historically recount the events by fashioning a script that adheres closely to the established facts. Straczynski estimates that 95 percent of his script came directly from transcripts, testimonies, and courtroom records about the Collins case. Unfortunately, this slavish devotion to historical accuracy in depicting the story acts as a double-edged sword. The film allows us to follow the horrors that affect this woman but never to appreciate the full humanity of any of the film’s characters.

Even Angelina Jolie-one of the best actresses working in film today-who is onscreen for at least two-thirds of the film, has difficulty in making her character seem like a real person. This is because the film never gives her either the trappings of a real life with family, friends, and neighbors rushing in to offer the most basic support so common in this kind of crisis or any moments of doubt about her own perceptions. Her police tormentors (Jeffrey Donovan and Colm Feore), her medical tormentors (Denis O’Hare, Peter Gerety, Wendy Worthington, and Riki Lindhome), and even the ersatz Walter (Devon Conti) come across as positively inhuman. Their dialogue may have come directly from documents they authored or from testimony recorded, but it fails to resonate for the audience because it is at odds both with what the audience knows about the situation and what that character is confronting directly-mostly the righteous anger and anguish of Christine Collins. Their cruelty seems unmotivated, their failure to grasp the most primal of relationships seems beyond baffling, and the absence of any reflective thought about what they are perpetrating is shocking. The film’s heroes don’t fare much better. Reverend Gustav Briegleb (John Malkovich), Christine’s champion against police mistreatment, comes across as only two-dimensional. Amy Ryan gives a colorful, though not particularly nuanced, performance as her guide to surviving inside the psychiatric hospital. There is a second part of the film that has more to do with what may have actually happened to Walter Collins. Michael Kelly, Eddie Alderson, and Jason Butler Harner do manage to breathe some life into their secondary, but key, roles as detective, witness, and perpetrator of a most heinous series of crimes.

This is a film that engages our incredulous fascination at the twin atrocities by which Christine Collins is victimized. It shakes our faith in our own social fabric because of how it failed her so profoundly. We ponder how the perception of women’s role in society in the 1920s contributed to the ease with which her protesting voice is discounted. Yet the film, ultimately, keeps us at arms length and fails to allow us to fully internalize the human tragedy we have witnessed because it has failed to make the characters human. Pride and Glory is a wild-even outlandish-fiction about the challenges and perils facing our police, but the movie makes us viscerally feel and embrace its characters’ humanity despite a story that is repellent. Changeling is a true story, but its lack of humanity in the portrayal of its characters makes it feel false. Straczynski, the first-time screenwriter, was justifiably delighted that Clint Eastwood had directed a film using his script, that Angelina Jolie and John Malkovich acted in it, speaking his dialogue, and that all this success was happening with his script’s first draft. However, perhaps a little tweaking of the script actually was needed.