Lara Croft's hotpants are now only a distant memory ... Angelina Jolie in The Exchange
To read the reviews you'd be forgiven for thinking that the competition was over and the Oscars already annexed. Clint Eastwood's new film emerged from its Cannes premiere firmly installed as the new favourite to take the Palme d'Or this weekend. Its star, Angelina Jolie, is tipped for the best actress Oscar next February.
I missed the premiere but managed to catch a later screening. In the interim, Eastwood's film appears to have changed its title (from Changeling to The Exchange), which might account for the sense that I'm seeing a slightly different film from the one I've read about. The movie follows the trials of a single mother in late-20s LA who loses her son and then falls foul of the authorities when she refuses to be palmed off with a look-alike. It's a solid, confident, old-school studio picture that packs a few big emotional wallops. But it is also ponderous and self-important, with a surfeit of lead in its boots. Jolie carries it and her knees sometimes buckle.
But the public perception of Jolie is changing as well. She has been the wild child, the ingénue, the sex symbol and the global phenomenon. Now she's entering a new phase and seeing if it fits: the mature, respected artist.
Actually Jolie has always been, if not a great actor, then certainly a charismatic one. I liked her in those puckish early roles and I particularly appreciated the way she blasted Winona Ryder clean off the screen in Girl, Interrupted - that pampered, whiney little vanity project. If only the Oscar she won for Girl, Interrupted hadn't turned out to be such a poisoned chalice. Almost instantly, she embarked on a series of jaw-droppingly awful movies, as if to prove (like Brando before her) that she wasn't that interested in acting anyway. In the meantime her beauty went from radiant to irradiated; went beyond beauty to become something almost laughable. She grew into the emblematic bonkers Hollywood celebrity.
According to Peter Bradshaw, Jolie is "never knowingly under-acted", and that's still the danger throughout The Exchange. At times her performance in the film is overwrought. At others she goes the other way and turns over-mannered and pensive, like a delinquent kid who has turned over a new leaf and is trying - a little too hard - to impress her tutors. Even so, she acquits herself well. Despite a few wobbles, Jolie manages to hold an elephantine, episodic picture together and even convinces as a vulnerable working-class woman pushed around by a corrupt patriarchy. She's buckling down, not buckling under.
