- Changeling
Jersey Boys, Clint Eastwood’s latest film, opened this Friday, and it’s based on the popular stage musical about Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons. Eastwood strikes me as the ideal director to translate this story to screen because many of his films are alternately affectionate and critical explorations of forms and customs indigenous to American art and culture, including jazz (Bird), country music (Honkytonk Man), the film western (Unforgiven, Bronco Billy), and now, doo-wop. Of course, he has other interests—politics (Absolute Power), crime (Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil), spirituality (Hereafter), family (Mystic River), the masculine identity (High Plains Drifter), and his own identity (Sudden Impact)—but Eastwood’s best films deftly illustrate the American experience regardless of subject matter, a transcendent quality unique to our country’s greatest directors. Many of his New Hollywood peers were as (if not more) influenced by European art cinema as their native cinema; but Eastwood retained a specific interest in American movies, which naturally fed into his interest in American life. For him, the two go hand in hand. Here are my five favorite Clint Eastwood movies.
- Changeling (2008) An exceedingly underrated film, a dark and aggressive survey of political and social injustice that filters the director’s trademark “vigilante revenge” story model through a female perspective. Rather than present the 1920s as a simpler or somehow more innocent time, the film highlights the rampant corruption among power groups of the era, specifically the LAPD, whose arrogance, as conceived by Eastwood, seemingly knows no bounds. Like other late-period Eastwood films, themes of child endangerment are prevalent and amplified by the story’s Kafkaesque maternal viewpoint.
