The opposite of Lara Croft: In Clint Eastwood’s film “The Strange Son” Angelina Jolie plays a young mother whose child is kidnapped.

Soon she will have a boy back. Unfortunately, she is sure that he is not her son. Unfortunately, Jolie is pandering too much to Oscar voters.

Ever since Clint Eastwood reached such admirable late form, it has become increasingly difficult to write about his films without giving dangerously much away. 

In “Mystic River” a lot hinges on the suspicion that Tim Robbins may have killed Sean Penn’s sister.

In “Million Dollar Baby” we are suddenly hit with a low blow when the boxing Hilary Swank finds herself paralyzed in her hospital bed from one second to the next and the newcomer’s triumph turns into a euthanasia conflict. 

And “The Strange Son” also has a moment like this halfway through, which radically throws Eastwood’s latest work off the path it initially set.

At first everything looks like a nostalgic mother drama. Cozy red trams rattle through Los Angeles in 1928, and Christine Collins (Angelina Jolie) flies on roller skates as a supervisor through the rows of plugging women in the telephone exchange, familiar from hundreds of old films.

One day, however, the single parent comes home and her ten-year-old son Walter has disappeared and remains so until the police report five months later that he has been found thousands of kilometers away. She stages a reunion spectacle at the train station, the photographers take photos, and the police chief is beaming – until the mother claims that this boy is a stranger to her.

The fact that the man found is smaller than Walter, is not recognized by the teacher and the dental impressions don’t match – no evidence helps the mother because the police don’t want to let their “success” be ruined. Finally, the police chief commits Christine to the mental asylum, among other inconveniences. Declaring dissidents crazy was apparently not a Soviet invention, anyway.

In the past, that would have been more than enough material for an entire film, a juicy maternal melodrama. But on the one hand we are in the age of wild genre mixes – science fiction with comedy, crime thriller with western, vampire with romance film, the more unlikely the better – and on the other hand it is a true story, which soon has a personal dimension escalated into a public scandal.

A friend of screenwriter Michael Straczynski came across it while digitizing old newspaper collections, and – oh wonder! – the events had never been made into a film, even though they shook Los Angeles to its foundations eight decades ago.

You’ve just seen the “mother fights for her child” track à la “Woman from Checkpoint Charlie”, when “The Strange Son” veers towards the “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” horror, and Angelina Jolie finds herself in her “crazy” environment again (except this time she’s playing the Winona Ryder character).

Then Eastwood shifts the focus again, this time into “Chinatown” and “LA Confidential” territory, and a swamp of corruption unfolds before our eyes that a courageous pastor (John Malkovich) tries to drain. The film then sets up a serial killer story – and even that isn’t the last straw.

Eastwood, with his economical narrative style, brings all this together relatively harmoniously, but at times you get the feeling that you are only seeing the tip of stories that could be as huge as icebergs.

After all, there are Eastwood traces of his past everywhere. “The Strange Son” can be viewed as a complement to “Mystic River”; There the crime against a child destroyed a community a quarter of a century later, here a child abduction exposes the depravity of an entire city.

Or the mystical Eastwood endings: in “Texan” as well as in “Merciless” and “Baby” the hero simply disappeared into the darkness of the unknown; in the “Son” it is no different.

The unifying factor of the disparate elements is, of course, Angelina Jolie, who comes across as a movie star in Gatsby-esque ensembles, even though her character can actually only look like a small-time employee who would like to look like a movie star (and that’s a key difference). She lets us take part in her emotional baths, appearing tearful, stoic and sad to death.

If you compare this with her last big outburst in “A Mighty Heart”, where her husband has just been beheaded by Islamists on the Internet, she seems better directed here. In “Heart” you seemed to be witnessing a volcano of emotions, in which the effort to avoid an eruption was always evident; In “Son,” Eastwood doesn’t allow her such acting antics.

However, it presents them with increasingly higher hurdles, and when Christine Collins towards the end has to pin the man on death row to the wall and desperately scream at him, even a Meryl Streep would probably have failed because of the absurdity of the arrangement.

In one scene, Christine bets with colleagues as to who will win the Oscar for Best Film of the Year. Christine bets on An Underdog, a little comedy with Clark Gable and Claudette Colbert called “It Happened One Night.”

We know that she will be right, but at the same time we feel that “The Stranger’s Son” is allowing itself one wink too many at the Oscar voters of 2009. A little less would have been more here too.