I have not been kind to Changeling, the Angelina Jolie-starring, Clint Eastwood-directed Oscar bait which opens wide today –– but admittedly, I also haven’t taken it very seriously. After seeing the supposed true-to-life drama at the New York Film Festival last month, I made the snap judgment that the film didn’t deserve my time –– it was such a silly, blatant exercise in statuette fishing, I thought, that the energy that I could expend detailing all its faults and falsehoods would be much better spent elsewhere. And certainly, plenty of other critics have covered some of the film’s key problematic factors. Dana Stevens‘ review pretty much sums it up, whether she’s citing Eastwood’s “clomping heavy-handedness” or his need to create a “deeply phony moral universe” in which to surround his victim-as-martyr manipulation shtick, which “keeps us at a stately remove, presenting Christine’s suffering as a kind of religious tableau.” But it was a throwaway line in A.O. Scott’s NYT review that made me realize that Changeling isn’t just a bad film –– it’s the final sign in a long line of them that Angelina Jolie, as we once knew her, has ceased to exist. That’s worth a minute or two.

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