Buy it... if you have appreciated Clint Eastwood's soft, melodic writing for his previous, similarly intimate character dramas.

Avoid it... if you demand music that transcends the description of "basically functional" and actually provides badly needed depth and density to the film.

Eastwood

Changeling: (Clint Eastwood) The transformation of Clint Eastwood into a director of bittersweet, weighty dramas continues with 2008's Changeling, a vintage police story with early aspirations of Oscar gold. Unfortunately for Eastwood and Universal Pictures, the film failed to meet any of its expectations, revealing significant production problems that caused audiences to quickly lose interest in the director's newest heartbreaker. The story by "Babylon 5" creator J. Michael Straczynski was the frequent target of early criticism for Changeling. He attempts to balance two unique storylines and slowly bring them together at the end of the film, though there is no doubt that the half of the plot dealing with a single mother and her lost son is the stronger element. The mostly-true story from 1928 Los Angeles follows the corruption of the city police and the mother's desperate search for her real son when the police offer another boy in his place. A parallel story involves a serial killer whose murder of boys at the same time in Southern California generated another famous investigation. Along with Straczynski's script, Angelina Jolie's lead performance also did not live up to initial hype, dulling an already morbidly grim subject. For film score collectors, the prospect of another Eastwood film featuring his own score writing abilities is cause for a collective groan, since nearly all of his compositional work has been badly underdeveloped in his previous attempts to score his own productions. As a pianist with a musically talent family, Eastwood obviously enjoys writing these themes for his scores and giving them a general orchestral direction.

Eastwood once again employs Lennie Niehaus to help flesh out his ideas, as well as his son Kyle to provide some of the performances. Despite being previously nominated for a Golden Globe for his score writing efforts, Eastwood's music is, on a technical level, that of an amateur, someone who does not employ the finer tactics of orchestral writing to give depth or density to his thematic ideas. Even with Niehaus expanding upon Eastwood's themes to give the score a marginally effective bed of sound, there are several technical problems with the recording that cannot be attributed to anything other than an overly simplistic approach to the writing. It's functional work at the most basic level, and therefore avoids the lowest marks. But this kind of film needs much more than functional music. Those harsh on Eastwood for these attempts (which were practically laughable in Flags of Our Fathers) have said that you could drag many of the punks targeted by "Dirty Harry" Callahan into a scoring studio and receive much of the same result. Eastwood's passion for music makes such statements a cheap shot, but he simply cannot avoid the due criticism relating to his simplistic music. His writing for Changeling revolves around a single theme passed around to different performers with a soft string section of about 30 members quietly providing basic backing. The piano, guitar, trumpet, bass, saxophone, and clarinet alternate sparse performances of this theme without any counterpoint or alteration to account for emotional shifts on screen. It's lounge music of the most intimate nature translated into a slightly broader canvas by Neihaus in an attempt to serve the picture. The solo trumpet performances are an obvious grasp at a film noir sound.

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The secondary plot of investigation is given synthetic vocal effects over lengthy dissonant phrases that do nothing more than increase the volume rather than expand upon any sense of complexity. For a film involving corruption, there is remarkably little convincing turbulence. The monothematic world of the single mother, graceful in musical tone even when distraught in character, has no musical relation to the serial killer half of the story, and the latter cluster of cues (led by the lengthy "We Killed Some Kids" and "Davey Tells Story") is nothing short of obnoxious. Eastwood and Neihaus will likely argue that the subdued nature of the music suffices for the internal drama on display in the film, just as they likely argued with Million Dollar Baby or Mystic River. But in the case of Changeling, there is simply no adequate excuse for regurgitating the same general sound for this context. On album, the problem is compounded by a 41-minute presentation that drags on for what seems like an eternity. The elegance of the solos in the long "End Title" recording would easily suffice to represent this entire score. There is no doubt that Changeling is a dramatic heavyweight of a film that could have greatly benefited from smart thematic manipulation, counterpoint, a mixing of major and minor keys, better representation of the period in time, and a gradual shift in tone as the mother's level of desperation increases throughout the picture. None of these finer aspects of film score writing are to be heard in Changeling, and for that reason alone, Eastwood continues to sell his own films short by insisting on writing the music. Perhaps he's just feeling lucky, but even if he makes his own day by writing this music, he remains a detriment to his cause. **   Amazon.com Price Hunt: CD or Download