Ruin it for me.

Obviously, this post has major spoilers.

SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS IM SPOILING THE WHOLE FILM YOUVE BEEN WARNED

Basically, the guy impersonating their son was a 23-year-old from France, Frederic Bourdin, who had a history of stealing identities and passing himself off as other people, usually children so that he could have access to children's homes and orphanages and such. You find out at the end of the film that this man was wanted by INTERPOL for years for doing this dozens of times in dozens of countries in Europe.

In the beginning of the story, Frederic is found in a phone booth in Spain by police (who he himself called from the phone booth, pretending to be a tourist who found him) and taken to a children's home. He talks about how he knew how to act like a child and acted scared and so on and so on. In the children's home, no one can get a name off of him so they threaten to have him arrested/thrown out if he cant prove who he is. He says he's American and he was kidnapped and he convinces the heads of the home to let him "contact his family" on his own. Using the time they give him to do so, he calls different police departments in the U.S. asking about missing children, pretending to be the head of the children's home. He finally finds a missing child that sounds like he could fit (missing for a few years, about 17 now, etc). He has the department fax him a black and white picture and decides he looks enough like the kid to impersonate him, since he would be older and there's a lot of change in people between 14 and 17. He tells the department this is, indeed, the kid they've found in Spain. Then he contacts Nicholas Barclay's family, pretending to be the head of the children's home and tells Nicholas' sister that they've found her brother but he doesnt want to speak to anyone because he's very scared and doesnt seem to remember much.

A few days later, Frederic sees a full-color picture of Nicholas and freaks out because he has dark hair and eyes and Nicholas is blonde and blue-eyed. He begins to panic and thinks he wont be able to pull it off, which is right when he gets the news that Nicholas' sister is going to come to Spain to pick him up and bring him back to the U.S. He buys hair dye and colors his hair blonde, and gets an amateur tattoo artist living in the home to replicate Nicholas' few small tattoos. When the sister arrives he figures there's no escaping now and goes to meet her. He wears a hat, sunglasses, and covers the bottom half of his face with a scarf. The sister tells him she remembers his nose, and that it's his uncle's nose. He says she seemed so eager for it to be her brother that she believed it was even though he looked nothing like him. He doesnt speak much to her because he has a thick French accent, and she thinks he's traumatized because he cant remember anything and wont speak. She shows him a bunch of pictures, pointing things out and telling him about family members, trying to get him to remember. A government official in Spain tests him to see whether he really is Nicholas by showing him what happen to be several of those same pictures, so he passes that test based on pure luck. They send him to the U.S. and grant him U.S. citizenship because his own sister believes he is Nicholas, he speaks good English, and he knows who the family members are in the pictures and seems to remember the events of them, so they cant see a reason why they shouldnt grant him citizenship.

He gets to Texas where Nicholas' family lives and somehow, they too believe he is Nicholas. Even Frederic acknowledges that he's astounded that they believe him. The only person that seems skeptical is Nicholas' half-brother that lives across town, who Frederic says looks at him like he knows he is not Nicholas but doesnt say anything to any of the rest of the family. Frederic goes to high school as Nicholas and begins to acclimate to his new life, excited about having a fresh start and an opportunity to live a real childhood, which he says he never got. A woman who works for the FBI in kidnapping/missing persons wants to interview Nicholas because it's so rare that a child is found in this sort of case and they want to know what happened to him during the three years he was missing, how he was taken and how he escaped and where he was. She says that when she asked the family to interview Nicholas, on separate occasions the sister flat-out refused and the mother told her she couldnt make her bring Nicholas in and laid on the floor in protest. Both the mother and the sister claim to not remember doing this. Eventually she does end up interviewing him and he tells a tale of extreme abuse, how he was kept in a sex ring in Europe and was moved every couple of weeks, never knowing where he was. He says they had a solution that changed his eye color and beat his face every day so he'd be unrecognizable, and would torture all of the boys if they ever spoke English. He also claims he was raped on a regular basis and other specific details of the trauma he suffered. The agent says she believed him because he was so detailed and she couldnt believe anyone could be that good of an actor, that normal people cant just make up that kind of thing. He also had lots of cigarette burns and other scars consistent with the level of beating he described. The FBI begins an investigation into the sex ring. Contrary to the FBI's wishes, Frederic goes public with his story as Nicholas, giving an in-depth TV interview, which he says he did to make his version of Nicholas even more "real".

A Dallas lawyer (I think he was a lawyer... this is where the details get a little fuzzy for me), Charlie Parker, sees the interview while eating in a diner and feels there's something fishy about it, because the man in the interview doesnt look 17 and has a dark beard and dark eyes and always wears a hat and sunglasses. In the booth hes sitting in, there happens to be an old reward poster for Nicholas Barclay, and he looks at it as he's watching the interview and decides it absolutely cannot be the same kid. He says he learned somewhere that the one thing people cant change about themselves, and that never changes with puberty, is the shape of their ears. He pulls up a screenshot of the Nicholas interview and compares it to the Nicholas reward poster, zoomed in on the ears. Frederic has detached earlobes while Nicholas has attached ones, and Parker decides that's good enough proof that it's absolutely not Nicholas Barclay onscreen. He asks to have lunch with "Nicholas" and after talking for a while Frederic admits that they both know he is not Nicholas Barclay. Frederic says the family is so eager to accept him as Nicholas and he recounts how pushy the sister was in Spain, trying to force him to remember, remember, remember people and places and things. He tells Parker that he believes the family had a hand in Nicholas' death, and that's why they have turned a blind eye to the fact that he looks nothing like and is obviously not Nicholas. Parker considers this and begins interviewing neighbors of the Barclays, who say that there was a lot of abuse in the household and they would always hear yelling and screaming coming from the house. The neighbors also say Nicholas ran away several times and was actually somewhat of a violent and misbehaving child, contrary to the little angel the Barclays have painted for the press. Charlie Parker begins to believe that Nicholas' half-brother (whose name I cant remember, forgive me), who seemed to know Frederic was not Nicholas but accepted it anyway, actually killed Nicholas, and that his mother knew about it and helped hide the body. He goes to the half-brother's house and talks to him, and the half-brother turns up dead a few days later of an apparent suicide/drug overdose.

While this is going on, the FBI agent has also realized Frederic is full of it. She has him fingerprinted and they find the match for Frederic Bourdin, wanted by INTERPOL. He is arrested and sentenced to 6 years in jail. A case is opened against Nicholas' family, accusing them of hiding knowledge about Nicholas' death. The person who lives in the half-brother's old house agrees to let Charlie Parker dig in his backyard, where he believes Nicholas' body is buried. The guy living in the house says his dog always used to dig in one spot in the back corner under a large bush, and he looked back there and saw a piece of blue tarp but couldnt pull it up without breaking pieces off, and so forgot about it and left it alone. Parker is shown digging, but does not find the blue tarp the guy spoke of, or anything else. The epilogue states that Bourdin served his 6 years, still trying to impersonate missing children using the phone in his cell, and that he now has a wife and two or three children. The case against the Barclay family is closed due to lack of evidence, and they point out that no one should believe a word that comes out of Bourdin's mouth, but Bourdin swears he knows they killed Nicholas and he still believes it.

Completely fascinating article about the case...

http://m.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/08/11/080811fa_fact_grann?currentPage=all

How come the family didn't notice difference in eye color is what bothers me.