Dirty Harry comes to Cannes
The original title was Changeling, reflecting the sad and terrifying plot: a child is kidnapped from his home in 1928 Los Angeles, and then a different child is returned. When his mother (Angelina Jolie) points this out, she finds herself in the middle of a police and political cover-up that sends her to a horrific psychiatric hospital and eventually brings down the administration. In the meantime, a serial killer named Gordon Northcott – a real-life figure who lived in Vancouver – is being hunted in the deaths of 20 children.
The movie is based on a true story. It is called l’Echange in France, and the day before its first press screening, the new American title was announced as the English translation of that: The Exchange. However afterwards, Eastwood wasn’t so sure that the announcement was accurate, even when he was told that it had been put in writing.
That may be in writing, but is it the truth?," he asked, partly as a joke and partly to underline the movie’s themes, the lies and ambiguities in a story where the forces of male power can stifle the voice of a woman seeking justice.
"It’s one person’s voice, and even though she was considered a minority, especially in that particular time, just kept going, just kept going," Eastwood said. "It’s a great study of human characteristics and one mother fighting against a whole city."
Police corruption is not a subject that’s foreign to the actor-director-musician (he also wrote the score for the film.) Among his duties in Cannes will be to introduce a Thursday night screening of Dirty Harry, the 1971 film in which he played the no-nonsense San Francisco cop Harry Callahan, a role that helped establish his tough-guy persona.
"That was 37 years ago and it was more of an adventure story, but it also showed a tenacious police officer who wanted to fight against a political bureaucracy," he pointed out. Eastwood, who turns 78 at the end of May, said he also enjoyed it as a fantasy role: "Point a .44 Magnum at someone and say, ‘Do you feel lucky?’"
Ask his star, and she’ll tell you luck has nothing to do with Eastwood’s success as an Oscar-winning filmmaker (Unforgiven). "He’s everything you kind of hope he would be," Jolie said a few days earlier. "He’s so strong, and he’s so cool, and on top of it, I’ve never seen a director so kind to the crew or appreciative of every single crew member. He’s gracious, he’s patient with them. He’s just wonderful. He’s the leader you hope for in every aspect of life."
On Tuesday, Jolie said her performance was partly based on her own mother, Marcheline Bertrand, who died last year. "To me she’s very much like my mother," she said. "My mother was very passive in many ways and very, very sweet, but when it came to her children she was a lion."
The Exchange, if that’s what it’s called, is in competition at the Cannes festival, and while Eastwood has mixed feelings about what that might mean -"a lot of good films have won and a lot of not-so-good films have won" – he says he never considered showing it out of competition, a category where many Hollywood films have been entered here.
"It seems like if you’re going to come to a film festival that has a competition, you might as well be in competition," he said. "To play it out of competition is kind of playing it safe." At any rate, judging from the press reaction after the first screening, Eastwood has a good shot at the Palme.
His movies – which also include Letters From Iwo Jima, Million Dollar Baby and Mystic River – come with several common themes, including questioning authority ("I like questioning it") and loss of innocence.
"Children in danger is about the highest form of drama you can have," he says, speaking of the Cannes movie. "Crimes against children are the most heinous crimes that there are. And when one comes along quite as big as this one you question the humanity, and it never ceases to surprise you how cruel humanity can be."
And most of all, Eastwood’s cinema is concerned with search for the truth. "Truth is the most important thing," Eastwood says. "Most stories of intrigue are certainly trying to get at the truth. And telling the truth is one of the most important things for an actor. It’s the greatest virtue on the planet."
When Eastwood says it, it doesn’t have to be put in writing.
