Some images aspire to be something beyond just images. They seek to become objects of veneration: icons. Angelina Jolie, as she appears in Clint Eastwood's Changeling, is more than a mere actress or an over-publicized movie star: She's an icon of suffering. Zinedine Zidane, at least in Douglas Gordon and Philippe Parreno's portrait, is not simply a star athlete or even the world's greatest soccer player: He is projected as 21st-Century Man.

Jolie doesn't perform in Changeling; she resolutely presents herself to the audience for admiration. The main attraction in Eastwood's two-fisted snake-pit weepie is the spectacle of Jolie's steely self-possessed suffering. As she lost her husband to Islamic terrorists in A Mighty Heart, Our Lady of Humanitarian Narcissism here endures another dreadful fate: losing her child to a mob of knaves, know-nothings, and psychos, even as she's persecuted by the entire state institutional apparatus of California.

Based on a forgotten tabloid saga that illuminates a particularly lurid Los Angeles guilty secret and might have appealed equally to neo-noirist James Ellroy or cultural historian Mike Davis, Changeling is set in a late-'20s L.A. that Eastwood has lovingly repopulated with the streetcars and Model T's of his own childhood. Jolie's Christine Collins is a single mom and phone-company supervisor. One afternoon, her nine-year-old son vanishes from their modest bungalow; five months later, the LAPD announces with all due hoopla that the boy has been found. A reunion is staged, reporters are invited, and although dazed Christine immediately realizes that the cops are handing her another kid, she's told to take him home on a "trial basis—he has nowhere else to go."

The Collins mystery is predicated at least in part on the historical Christine's extreme suggestibility. Why did she accept this strange boy as her own? But this is subsumed in a greater mystery: Who could possibly compel Angelina Jolie to do anything she didn't want to do? Despite ample physical evidence that the child is not hers, as well as assistance from a teacher, a dentist, and a self-regarding radio preacher (John Malkovich), Christine is browbeaten by the police, bullied by the press, and finally committed to a local bedlam seemingly filled with people whose mental illness consisted in pissing off the cops.

There's no denying Changeling's moldy grandeur. The movie is Eastwood's version of a silent-era melodrama (and given the anachronistic psycho-babble, it might better have been one). Who doesn't want to like Changeling? Clint Eastwood too is an icon. He succeeded John Wayne as America's greatest cowboy and, billed as America's greatest living director, glared out from the cover of last month's Sight & Sound, a craggy object of uncritical devotion. It's been many years (and many mediocre films) since the near-successive appearance of Bird, White Hunter, Black Heart, and Unforgiven established Eastwood's directorial reputation. Where the existential war film Letters From Iwo Jima attested to his viability, Changeling signals only his ambition.

Eastwood's latest is an effort to be bracketed with Chinatown or L.A. Confidential in mythologizing the secret history of Los Angeles. But burdened by a convoluted script and an ensemble-proof leading lady, the director fails to illuminate a particular corrupt system. Meanwhile, this static, sluggish movie grows ever darker—even as it encompasses murder, pederasty, captivity, intimations of the Manson family, multiple courtroom scenes, and a death-row confrontation. For her part, Jolie reverts to her goth-girl origins—her mask of tragedy suggesting a skull costumed for Halloween in a cloche hat and ghoulishly kissable wax red lips.

Jolie is most convincing in her demand for recognition—and Eastwood is glad to oblige. Late in the movie, Christine confidently predicts that It Happened One Night will be the surprise Oscar winner of 1934. Soon after, she strikes a pose identified with Stella Dallas, the motherhood tearjerker for which Barbara Stanwyck received her first nomination in 1937. Image trumps performance. One needn't be clairvoyant to know that somewhere in Hollywood, someone is imagining her acceptance speech.

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