Eastwood’s last truly great movie (not that any of his subsequent films have been terrible, save for perhaps Gran Torino), tells the true-ish story of the return of a woman’s disappeared son who turns out to be a different child altogether, and her refusal to accept the falsehood pushed on her by police results in a whole host of questions about power and the societal dismissal of women and corruption. Angelina Jolie controls the movie just as she did the previous year in A Mighty Heart, capturing the resiliency of this mother. It’s a pretty beautiful story of a feminist hero. While it was criticized for being generic and conventional, I found its emotional stakes to be entirely engaging and its themes more interesting than its somewhat straightforward plot would seem to indicate.
Changeling is likely another example of Eastwood’s ability to take a story and tell it in a way that seems simple but contains multitudes beneath the surface. It’s a hard thing to articulate, kind of like explaining how an actor can express a plethora of thought and feeling behind his or her eyes. It’s possible this was the last instance where I and many others were willing to give Eastwood the benefit of the doubt, before his simple style became perceived as simplistic. It’s also possible that his string of incredible movies raised the bar to an impossible height for him ever to reach again, and people express disappointment for that fact by feeling let down by his later movies.
Whatever it is, there’s no doubt that Clint Eastwood will end his career with one of the finest top five efforts among any filmmaker in movie history. For that, we should feel lucky.
