Let the Right One In

“Let the Right One In”

Sweden. 2008. Directed by Tomas Alfredson. Screenplay by John Ajvide Lindqvist based on his own novel. Starring: Kåre Hedebrant, Lina Leandersson, Per Ragnar, Henrik Dahl, Karin Bergquist, Mikael Rahm, Karl Robert Lindgren, Ika Nord, Peter Carlberg, Anders Peedu, Paul Olofsson and Cayetano Ruiz.

Rating: ★★★★

The Swedish movie, Let the Right One In takes the elements of a vampire film and sifts them brilliantly and unflinchingly through the harsh troubles of a pre-adolescent. I never imagined a movie could remind me of the sometimes merciless cruelty of junior high kids in Todd Solondz’s Welcome to the Dollhouse and the oppressive fatalism of F.W. Murnau’s classic 1922 silent film, Nosferatu at the same time. But this one did in its brutal yet heartfelt study of two 12-year olds, or more accurately, a 12-year old boy and a girl vampire stuck at 12, who are brought together by need, loneliness and the alienation from everyone else.

The boy is blonde-haired Oskar (Kåre Hedebrant), who lives with his divorced mother though neither she nor his father really wants or pays attention to him. Thus, he can hardly share his troubles in school, where he gets picked on by a sadistic bully who does not stop at repeatedly calling him names like “piggy” and flicking his nose but also coerces his classmates into whipping his body and across his face. Leading such a dreary life, one can see why he is almost driven to befriend the pale-faced Eli (Lina Leandersson), even if she turns out to be a vampire.

The best vampire movies understand that living forever in a fallen world feeding off other humans’ blood is an eternally dooming curse and so it is for Eli, whom we later realize has lived at the age of 12 for about 200 years. She also cannot go out into sunlight, of course, and Oskar first sees her sitting in solitude at the jungle gym outside their apartment late at night while he is acting out with a knife on a tree a pretense of revenge towards his cruel bullies. It is certainly peculiar that he does not observe sooner that she is sitting so comfortably in the dead cold of a Swedish winter in just her pajamas and we sense that perhaps he has been so lonely and beaten down by life to notice. They find out that they actually live next door to each other although she warns him, “You can’t be friends with me.”

But they do become friends and even deeper although romance may be too simple a word to describe their strong bond. Perhaps it seems that way for Oskar at least initially as he coyly asks her, “Will you be my girlfriend?” to which Eli replies, “I am not a girl.” It is much deeper than romance in many ways, however, because it is forged by their urge to find a degree of trust and comfort away from their bleak despair – with one caused by external circumstances and the other by their internal violent nature (unless one considers being turned into a vampire after being bitten circumstantial, too).

The relationship that is so impeccably and naturally acted by Hedebrant and Leandersson brings a center of warmth and some humor in a movie that has an overall suitably bleak tone (and the film is no doubt inappropriate for most pre-teens). I have not gone into the grimmest elements including a subplot involving a serial killer, Håkan (Per Ragnar) who targets teenage boys at night. The gloom of everything around only accentuates the symbiotic relationship that Oskar and Eli build. Initially, of course, we vaguely fear for Oskar whom we sense may be playing with fire but he is well past the point of being surprised, and when he is so neglected by his parents or physically beaten by his peers, befriending a vampire may bring safety and even empathy (albeit it could also possibly encourage some darker, pathological deeds).

The movie is directed by Tomas Alfredson and adapted by John Ajvide Lindqvist from his own novel and is certainly one of the most atmospheric and visually stunning films of the year. One shrewd artistic choice that I particularly admired in their highly wintry color palette is how it uses the hues of red against our own expectations. We know that we will see blood in a vampire story but Alfredson and his cinematographer, Hoyte van Hoytema drain out its color to border on black so that the brighter, truer reds are left to Oskar and then particularly Eli’s clothing that reflect the warmth that the two share in their friendship. Also, the violence and shocks (including a very subtle moment when Eli suddenly scales up the walls of a hospital building) are executed for maximum effect because they are always seen with a static, level eye, usually at a distance, and never in cheap close-up. One memorably horrific sequence in which severed body parts fall underwater is sure to become a classic cinematic shot along the lines of similar ones in Jaws.

Despite that this is one of the best vampire movies ever made and also one of the best of the year, I am afraid that any description of the movie will drive away many audiences who will feel the movie is too dark and rather go for a more conventional teen romance like the movie adaptation of the book, Twilight. And yet again, the rights of the original book have been bought for another remake to be directed by Matt Reeves of Cloverfield fame. Although the remake will reportedly be another re-interpretation of the original source novel, Alfredson has said that he fears the movie will become too mainstream and I share those fears, too. One of the movie’s really great qualities is its methodical pacing to let the film's characters and story developments never obviously explain themselves and just silently creep up for us to piece together and understand like Eli herself. That is a trait Hollywood seems either unable or unwilling to exercise in most dramatic horror movies these days (and even a good vampire movie like 1994’s Interview with the Vampire fell short of greatness because it concentrated too much on mood without much of a story).

The movie’s title, Let the Right One In is one whose meaning we do not quite comprehend until later in the film when there is an interesting spin on the old myth that a vampire cannot enter a room until a person invites them in. A closer study of the title may warrant more than one viewing: One through Oskar’s eyes and the other through Eli’s. Then we can see how each one’s needs are so very different, making their understanding of each other profound and their bond either rewarding or just disturbingly fleeting.

Changeling

“Changeling”

USA. 2008. Directed by Clint Eastwood. Written by J. Michael Straczynski. Starring: Angelina Jolie, John Malkovich, Jeffrey Donovan, Amy Ryan, Colm Feore, Michael Kelly, Sanford Clark, Gattlin Griffith, Devon Conti, Denis O'Hare, Jason Butler Harner, Geoff Pierson, Reed Birney and Peter Gerety.

Rating: ★★★

Few corruption cases have been as baffling as the one presented in Clint Eastwood’s new movie, Changeling. Think about it. What went through the minds of those L.A. police officers who were so blindsided with boosting their public image that they tried to fool a mother that a completely different boy is her long-missing child? Despite the all too obvious and overwhelming evidence that this new child is not actually her son, the police department refused to listen and skirted every which way to only cover their own public image. When she was about to go public with her plight, they put her in a mental hospital and threw away the key so that no one would give credence to whatever she had to say.

Clint Eastwood’s latest is based on these true but now somewhat forgotten events in the late 1920s to 1930s. As a director who has grown more ambitious and prolific with age, he also seems ever more deliberate to place a photo-negative on the numerous action roles he played as an actor in the past. I am actually surprised he waited this long to dramatize a real-life case as a representation of the police corruption that Dirty Harry Callahan would certainly have understood and been further disgruntled with.

The movie stars Angelina Jolie as the mother, Christine Collins, a telephone operator living in the suburbs of Los Angeles and single mother to nine-year-old Walter (Gattlin Griffith). One afternoon in March 1928, coming home late after filling in for another employee at work, she finds that her son has disappeared. She frantically calls the police only to be told that their policy is that they do not consider a boy missing until after 24 hours. Days and months pass, as various people around her pray for her son's safe return including Reverend Gustav Briegleb (John Malkovich), who makes radio broadcasts criticizing and condemning the corrupt deeds of the Los Angeles police department. Then, good news arrives that her son has been found in Illinois and will be brought back escorted by Captain J.J. Jones (Jeffrey Donovan).

When she sees the boy at the train station, however, she immediately sees that this boy (Devon Conti) they have brought back is not Walter. Jones assures this is really him, as the boy recalls the Collins home address. Despite her doubts, she reluctantly takes him home until she measures that this boy's height is a full three inches shorter. When she goes to confront Jones about this, he snidely accuses her of avoiding returning to her motherly responsibilities. Even when a psychiatrist visits, he only harasses her, saying that this is indeed Walter after providing a phony explanation for the height difference.

She gets further evidence supporting her claim from the family dentist who immediately recognizes that the dental records do not match and Walter’s school teacher and her class who do not recognize this new boy. Just before she is about to go on one of Briegleb’s broadcasts with this information, however, Jones orders that she be placed in the mental hospital under the care of Dr. Jonathan Steele (Denis O’Hare). There, Christine meets another fellow patient, Carol Dexter (Amy Ryan) and sees that most every woman in the ward has been put there to keep quiet about a potential scandal. Meanwhile, Briegleb, catching on to her sudden absence, soon steps in as a crusading ally for Christine.

These proceedings uncoil in the movie as a true nightmare that would really be too strange for fiction and are eventually linked to the infamous Wineville Chicken Coop Murders at the hands of Gordon Northcott (Jason Butler Harner). As always, Eastwood, working from a screenplay by J. Michael Straczynski (best known for his sci-fi TV show, Babylon 5), directs and presents his story in the sparest way possible. He depends on the basics of character interaction to reflect the power of a scene and his camera (shooting with his regular cinematographer, Tom Stern in a drained-out color palette bordering on black and white as in Brian De Palma’s The Black Dahlia and Eastwood’s last great masterpiece, Letters from Iwo Jima) only looks and discerns without an extraneous stylistic device. Also, his recreation of the 1920s and '30s L.A. streets with cable cars and period town buildings are flawless, although the musical score by Eastwood, while effectively subtle, at times seems closer to 1940s.

Where the film and the screenplay show some limitations that prevent this movie from moving in the first rank of Eastwood’s directorial career is in the final act. There are many details to cover from the deepening corruption from the police chief, James E. Davis (Colm Feore) and Jones to the serial killer and they are certainly all part of the whole historical telling. Yet the screenplay feels too disjointed in checking off these points to finish in a clean emotional sweep. The story struggles to tie up all of its loose ends with multiple resolutions, and though I see why the movie ends on the note it does, it should have stayed closer to the heroine’s direct emotional perspective to give it greater impact rather than getting mired in the procedural minutiae in the end. And the tone of the ending, while not entirely upbeat, is still too neat and reassuring considering that this was only one of many cases of corruption in the police department.

As usual, however, Eastwood gets uniformly strong, memorable performances out of his cast that carry the film past its problems. Jolie thankfully seems to be returning to her acting roots and with A Mighty Heart and now this movie she may become the go-to actress to essay maternal figures that maintain patient grace under pressure during familial loss. It is also nice to see Malkovich play a really positive portrait of a preacher who not only sermonizes but backs up his sermons with action. And Amy Ryan, coming off her much-acclaimed role in Gone Baby Gone, so conceals her real-life beauty again to play a disheveled sister character to the one that Jolie won an Oscar® for back in 1999’s Girl, Interrupted. Even the child actors including Gattlin Griffith, Devon Conti and Sanford Clark as a teenager who comes forward with crucial information on the crime play some very tricky notes of traumatic emotional breakdown and poker-faced deception impeccably. Also deserving mention is Michael Kelly, a character actor who often specializes in playing a slime ball but here is allowed to portray the first cop in the story who realizes his proper duties after gazing through the prism of evil.

While the other villains in the story including Jeffrey Donovan and Colm Feore are also very solid, the best performance in the film comes from the least known actor, Jason Butler Harner as the murderous Gordon Northcott. Many films seek to psychoanalyze the crazed motivations of a serial killer but Harner somehow pulls off the more difficult challenge of just inhabiting the murderous insanity without calling out for any kind of explanation or understanding. That the character’s self-loathing and pity is rendered so scarily despite the movie’s background omission of the more sordid details of the involvement of his mother (whom he later discovered was actually his grandmother as he was the result of incest between his father and sister) is a tribute to Harner’s chilling work here.

All of this tie back to the old LAPD of the 1920s and 1930s to which Changeling paints an angry social critique of blatant fabrication and deception at the potential cost of human life and decency (and it is in keeping with Eastwood’s recurrent exploration of truth versus lies as in his previous two back-to-back war movies and Mystic River). For all the classic TV shows like Dragnet that glamorized the department as following their own motto, “to serve and protect,” cases like this one proved that what they were serving and protecting was not always the public citizens. And something people don’t learn enough of time and time again is the fact that one would do better to boost public image by properly and honestly leveling with the public rather than refusing to empathize with basic feelings like the wounding loss of a child.