Freedomland

July 4, 2006

Julianne Moore plays Brenda, who walks through a low-income housing development in a daze, her hands badly cut and bleeding, to the hospital. She’s almost incoherent, possibly stoned, but she tells Detective Lorenzo Council (Samuel L. Jackson) that she was carjacked. Council suspects she’s hiding something and finally gets her to reveal that her son was asleep in the backseat and is missing.

At this point, Council– and the entire movie– break down. Council nearly has a panic attack, flailing his long limbs around, alternately berating Brenda, gasping for breath from his asthme, and generally desperately overacting. I know from the book that Council can see a terrible story beginning to unfold: a white woman carjacked and her child stolen by a black man in Armstrong, an area of projects where tensions with its predominantly white neighbors are already high. Unfortunately, watching the movie leaves us to think that the cool-talking Detective Council has simply never dealt with a serious crime before.

To make things worse, Brenda’s brother is a detective from the neighboring district. Soon, he and the entire white police squad have put Armstrong in virtual lockdown, despite it not being their jurisdiction and in the face of offering no help in the investigastion of the murders of three black children in the past three years. Meanwhile Council– flaunting pretty much every procedure imaginable– squires Brenda around town: back to the crime scene, to her apartment, to a friend’s apartment. He realizes there is more to this story and is desperate to uncover the truth before full-scale rioting breaks out. So desperate that he even decides to cooperate with a group of women who help search for missing children, lead by the marvelous Edie Falco. This triangle will ultimately reveal a truth that no one wants to accept.

Freedomland is a basket of loose ends and contradictions. Brenda’s brother seems intent on revenge, but nothing really seems to come of it, even when the truth comes out. Julianne Moore puts on a marvelous performance, but in service of a completely unbelievable and incomprehensible character. Samuel L. Jackson is– well– Samuel L. Jackson, but in a character that has neither the depth, nor the heights of cool, that his style demands. Only Edie Falco emerges from this job unscathed, her long scene with Julianne Moore one of the few examples of genuine emotion and sense. Othewise, the story simply unfolds, with seemingly disconnected events, until it ends… with a meandering coda that helps no one.

I should note that I didn’t find the book much better than the movie. Where the movie is missing too much to really build any dramatic intensity, the book is incredibly overwritten, killing the drama in wholly different way…

Tags: cinema, film, review, Screening Log