I have recently seen this film and felt very sentimental about this. It is particularly interesting because American police behavior (at least in 1920’s) was not in any way different from our own British legacy police, may be the behavior of LAPD was much worse than our own police methods in this film.
You would be shocked and surprised to see the injustice meted out to a single woman living all alone (single mothers is very common in US) being given a raw justice. She was searching for her missing son at about 8 years old and finally police finds the "the boy”.
She could not accept "the boy" of same age and similar features as her missing son simply because the boy , the one , police brought to her was not her boy. Here is the mistake in direction. ClintEastWood directed this film but remember it is not Million Dollar Baby or even Grand Torino.
I think it was Sahruk Khan who told (in recent times) that Hollywood people do not know how to tell a story. But there is professionalism in every aspect of the film.The heroine is an Oscar winning great actress Angelina Jolie. She is extremely beautiful but since the story demands a mother’s image portrayal, ClinteastWood took care that any glamorous aspect of this beautiful woman was not shown at all.
As we read in fables, that four thieves planned to cheat an unsuspecting innocent villager about his goat to be believed to be a donkey and you know the villager finally let go off the goat because he believed it was a donkey!!
So was Angelina in this film , almost believes that it was her son, because the police told her that she was under shock and that she was speaking "non sense" , they even blamed that she wanted to get rid of responsibility as mother and hence , she was complaining that it was not her son and trying to disown him.
So she was convinced or that she tried hard to "believe" that it was her son so much that the audience would be surprised.
She measures her son against a marking she made on the wall before her son went missing. In fact she measures her son every morning after he wakes up and appreciates his growing up. It was a beautiful mother and child relationship that we see in the beginning of the film.
Now in the changed circumstances, it was exactly the opposite. She was all in agitation. How can the boy grow shorter? so many months later ?!!
So she questions the police chief in the Head Quarters! But the police chief is adamant.
He insists that he is her son and expresses doubt about her mental health.
She questions that she had seen the boy while bathing him, to have been circumscribed pen*s.
As a mother it was normal for her to see her 8 year old son naked.
But the police man says that in a given time many things change!!
Finally she lands up in a mental asylum (mental hospital) with police acting unconstitutionally or
say, by taking the law in to their hands.
She was tortured with unknown injections in mental hospital including the mental hospital doctor who insists that she should sign an affidavit of the police version of the story, so that she would be released from mental hospital.
But she insists that mothers can not be cheated and that the boy was not her son.
She vehemently argues that her son was still missing and police were cheating her.
The story has a beneficial ending.
The audience shall be surprised at the police behavior and also at the infective law establishment until church people and a local politician interferes.
You shall enjoy this film; Angelina’s acting at one stage can bring tears to you. you will be moved or
shaken.
As I was watching this movie , I felt that her Oscar award winning (in some other film) was a well deserved one.