- Also Known As:
- Unknown
- Year:
- 2008
- Country/ies:
- US
- Predominant Genre:
- Mystery
- Author(s)/Director(s):
- Clint EASTWOOD
- Outstanding Performance(s):
- Angelina JOLIE
- Premiss:
- Grief-stricken mother takes on the police to her own detriment when it stubbornly tries to pass off an obvious impostor as her missing child.
- Theme(s):
- Alienation
- Compassion
- Destiny
- Empathy
- Grieving
- Guilt
- Humanity
- Identity
- Personal change
- Political Correctness
- Redemption
- Self-expression
- Sexism
- Solipsism
- White culture
- White supremacy
- Similar (in Plot, Theme or Style) to:
- Unknown
- Review Format:
- DVD
Not up to the usually-high Clint EASTWOOD standard, yet containing an excellent performance from Angelina JOLIE.
This film cannot make up its mind whether it is about a miscarriage of natural justice or the hunt for a serial killer. This lack of focus distracts from what could have been a hymn in praise of this mother’s love and of motherly love as such. This leads to its containing a great many deletable scenes that should have been but, sadly, were not.
These structural problems reflect mediocre screenwriting skills springing from an inability to really understand, from first hand experience, a mother’s position in relation to a kidnapped child.
The other mystery the movie never clears up is why the Los Angeles’ political scene of the time (1928) had become so institutionally corrupt. Unlike Chinatown, we never get a sense of jaded people working within a jaded system to keep their jaded secrets. This lack of insight mars a movie that is more of a retelling of events than a full-on dramatization of them; whose actors, nevertheless, do their utmost to flesh out their weakly-written characters.
Copyright © 2014 Frank TALKER. Permission granted to reproduce and distribute this posting in any format; provided mention of the author’s Weblog (Esthetics) is included: E-mail notification requested. All other rights reserved.
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