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Cannes Dispatch: Part Four: An online exclusive
An online exclusive
Angelina Jolie in L'echange
Wednesday, May 21, 2008
By Patrick Z. McGavin
CANNES, France—“To my friends, I have one thing to say: I’m back,” said the brilliant Polish director Jerzy Skolimowski while introducing his first film, Four Nights with Anna, as a director in 17 years. The stars and beautiful actresses provide the glamour and spectacle. Make no mistake, Cannes is about directors.
Twenty years ago, Clint Eastwood’s Bird, his soulful, poetic biography of Charlie Parker, debuted in competition here. Two years later, his White Hunter, Black Heart, a sharp exploration about damaged masculinity, folly and art, also played the festival. The appearance of those two works marked the beginning of Eastwood’s critical rise.
Eastwood’s new film, under its French title, L’echange, played to a packed house Monday morning. When the film opens this fall, it will either be called by the translated title, The Exchange, or its production title, Changeling. Based on the historical record of the notorious Wineville Chicken Murders scandal, the film is a period drama that unfolds over a seven-year period, and echoes Chinatown and LA Confidential. Angelina Jolie plays Christine Collins, a single mother whose nine-year-old son, Walter, inexplicably vanishes one Saturday afternoon in March.
After a five-month period of unendurable anguish and heartbreak, Christine angrily denounces the police force when they stage a public reunion with her “lost son,” after the boy the police department summons is clearly not her son. Her rebuke of authority carries significant personal damages, resulting in her detainment in a psychiatric ward. Her quickly deteriorating condition parallels a horrifying discovery that a sociopath has abducted and possibly killed up to 20 young boys, burying their remains on a desert farm in Riverside County.
The initial premise — a mother’s extraordinary determination to learn the truth about her son — evolves into a larger study of official misconduct, police malfeasance and the attempt to fathom the incomprehensible. L'echange reveals the officially sanctioned mistreatment of women, especially those outside the social norms. The scenes inside the ward have a chilling matter-of-factness, particularly when “code 12,” a term given for obstinate women who refuse to conform, is introduced.
Eastwood remains an exceptionally talented director. Since Play Misty for Me, his first film as a director, Eastwood has demanded respect. Largely because of the personal attacks against his work and art by Pauline Kael and her disciples, Eastwood was unfairly underrated for much of his first two decades behind the camera. Ever since Eastwood’s official rehabilitation, beginning with Unforgiven in 1992, the critical pendulum has swung too hard and far in the other direction. Eastwood’s work is now too often shrouded in the kind of praise and uncritical celebration that allows little room for critical disagreement.
L’echange is further evidence of an unfortunate tendency in his art. The movie runs 144 minutes. It is absorbing and never less than watchable, but the tonal shifts and stylistic decisions leave the work too often unmoored — as a result, the viewer is denied a consistent point of view. Of late, Eastwood has composed the scores of his own films. His score appears particularly discordant and off-note here. The omnipresence of his score too often flattens the material.
L’echange also has some jarring visuals. Eastwood’s typically precise and lyrical mise-en-scene usually results in a clean and unadorned visual style. This work has some unnerving inconsistencies, like a frightened boy’s recovered memory of the killer’s terrifying actions. At other times, the lack of subtlety is equally hard to fathom, like the camera’s insistence on a cigarette ash that trails, in slow motion, to the floor upon the movie’s gruesome revelation.
J. Michael Straczynski’s script has some vivid and evocative moments, but the transition from the particulars of Jolie’s emotional trauma to the larger social breakdown never quite coheres. Jolie is a technically impressive performer and she remains an astounding presence in front of the camera. One of Eastwood’s great strengths, his casting, is less secure this time. John Malkovich is too mannered as a populist radio orator whose advocacy for Jolie’s character often verges on the hysterical and aggressive. As the investigating police officer, Jeffrey Donovan is both too callow and unpersuasive. His venality comes off as self-absorption rather than officially sanctioned conduct.
The film’s second half is more confident and impressively detailed. Jason Butler Harner is the movie’s psycho killer. His ambiguous line readings, facial contortions and his peculiar body rhythms, often appearing a man wholly at odds with himself, provide some of the more interesting, idiosyncratic moments. The final “exchange,” in the jail house between him and Jolie is the strongest moment in the film. Based on the reviews I’ve read so far, I’m in the minority position. The sensationalized, tabloid nature of the material does not play to Eastwood’s strengths.
By contrast, Skolimowski is indeed back. The master director of Dead End and Moonlighting has been working mostly as a painter the last two decades. He was inspired by working with Canadian director David Cronenberg in Eastern Promises to resume his filmmaking. Derived from an article he read, Four Nights with Anna is a story of obsessive love. It plays like a smart and chilling analogue to Krzysztof Kieslowski’s A Short Film about Love. Both are fascinating works of voyeurism, but the Skolimowski is the far knottier and difficult work.
The story is fairly straightforward, unfolding in the punishing solitude of rural Polish towns. A lonely middle-aged man is consumed by the woman, a nurse, who lives across from his small farmhouse. Pathologically shy and unable to confront her in person, he undertakes a series of clandestine actions to watch, observe and seek her out. Skolimowski never judges his characters. He provides the means to study the implications of the man’s actions and document their impact on the woman.
He plays around, to very strong effect, the temporal action. The film’s time does not come into clear view until the end. Four Nights with Anna is a small though crucial movie. The director’s command for imagery, both surreal (like a dead cow floating in a river) or painful (like a sexual assault), mediates feeling and empathy. This is a talent very much worth welcoming home.