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"  For the next two weeks, Stephen Garrett will be reviewing notable movies from the 2008 Cannes Film Festival. To read more of his exclusive reviews, please click here. ***** Lurid but never exploitative, pulpy yet consistently classy, Clint Eastwood&amp;#039;s doppelganger epic Changeling lives up to its name as a case study of dualities. Or maybe it&amp;#039;s just a trade-off, as suggested by the Cannes Film Festival&amp;#039;s translation of the title as The Exchange (which may end up being used in the U.S. as well). Offering one thing for another, the Oscar-winning director borrows the genre trappings of a domestic drama, a women-in-prison flick, a legal thriller, and a slasher film, and mashes them all up into a year-end prestige picture that&amp;#039;s as stilted as it is ambitious. Based on a true-crime story set in 1920s Los Angeles, Changeling starts as a weeper about single mother Christine Collins (Angelina Jolie), who struggles to balance her career as a switchboard telephone supervisor with the demands of raising 10-year-old son Walter (Gattlin Griffith). After being called in for a last-minute Saturday shift, and forced to leave Walter without a babysitter, Collins returns to an empty house and the shocking reality of his disappearance. Five months pass before the clueless Los Angeles Police Department finally catches a break, when they hear that a juvenile drifter has been picked up in the southwest. The cops call the press and set up a tearful photo-op reunion at the train station, where Collins rushes to get her child \u2014 but then discovers that it&amp;#039;s the wrong kid. The LAPD, though, convince her that she&amp;#039;s too emotional to know for sure, and that the boy has just been physically traumatized beyond easy recognition. The real truth is that the LAPD honchos, desperate for a win and eager to close the case, convinced an orphan to pretend to be Walter. And once Collins discovers that the imposter is an inch shorter than the real Walter (and circumcised to boot), then she starts rattling around the corridors of law enforcement demanding justice. Their response: throw her in jail for psychiatric evaluation along with all the other &amp;quot;crazy&amp;quot; ladies who question their methods. If that&amp;#039;s not enough plot for you, don&amp;#039;t worry, because then a young teen pops up at the local precinct and confesses to being made an accomplice to the butchery of a score of children at an abandoned ranch on the outskirts of town. Meanwhile, a popular evangelist (John Malkovich) with a radio show and a longstanding crusade against the city&amp;#039;s police force puts pressure on the authorities to release Collins. All of the narrative threads point to the film&amp;#039;s real mission: exposing rampant corruption at the highest levels of authority. And Eastwood dutifully widens the canvas to make room for grandstanding speeches against abuses of power. But the smaller, earthier, more vivid plot points that deal with such visceral topics as Collins&amp;#039; emotional state (her anxieties about motherhood, the terrors of her wrongful imprisonment) or the skewed psychoses of a serial killer (his methodic kidnappings, the premeditated massacres) are given short shrift -- despite the fact that the film eventually narrows its view back to the pair for its oh-the-humanity climax. What&amp;#039;s left? The story is reduced to quick sketches of sadness, defiance, outrage and uplift, coupled with long courtroom moments of righteous rage and civic indignation, and therein lies the real tragedy at the heart of this docudrama. Ultimately all of Eastwood&amp;#039;s genre-blending comes up with nothing more than a hollow highbrow message movie that lacks all the blood and verve of its lowbrow inspirations. Moviegoers may feel that the real exchange plays more like a bait and switch. Clint Eastwood&amp;#039;s Changeling opens on November 7, 2008 in the United States. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/entertainment/movies/reviews/a4662/changeling-movie-review/>