Prior to this film, nobody would ever have heard of Christine Collins, a single mother living in Los Angeles in the 1920s. Screenwriter and former journalist Michael Straczynski developed his script using old newspaper clippings and City Hall records and director Clint Eastwood has recreated the prohibition era with flawless detail. Angeline Jolie dominates every scene as the distraught mother, Christine Collins, whose son Walter disappeared when she was unexpectedly called in to work one day. Desperate for a good news story, the Los Angeles Police Department assembles a press to record the moment when mother and son are reunited, but Collins is adamant that the boy who is forced into her arms for the photo is not her son.
This is only the beginning of this story as the film brings back to life the incredible battle that Collins faced when she continued to insist that the boy was not her son. In the battle of intuition versus ‘the facts’ Collins finds out what can happen when those in power are challenged. She is declared an unfit mother, institutionalised on the word of the police and has all her rights taken away. It is not sufficient to say the ‘truth is stranger than fiction’ because this is what happened (and still happens to some extent) to those without powers in a society.
Just as Rev Gusrav Briegleb (John Malkovich) intervenes on her behalf, serial killer Gordon Northcott, who kidnapped and killed 20 boys during that time, is captured and the Collins boy is suspected of being one of the victims. As Eastwood yet again goes in to bat for the underdog, he has produced another masterpiece about fighting long and hard for skerricks of justice. Thanks to Eastwood, Straczynski and Jolie, Christine Collins is no longer an unrecorded part of history.
