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Freedomland wants to be a suspense thriller as
well as a commentary on race relations. It succeeds not at all in the former and only
tangentially in the latter. What it does offer are two brilliant performances
that flesh out two interesting and well-developed characters and they make the movie worth
seeing.
Brenda Martin (Julianne Moore), 37, a resident of a Gannon, a working
class New Jersey suburban town, has a history as a school dropout and a drug addict, but
the birth of her son gave her life meaning and she seems to have turned it around. Now she
appears, distraught and with bloodied hands, claiming to have been carjacked by a black
man near Armstrong, the predominantly black housing projects of the neighboring community,
Dempsy.
Dempsy police detective Lorenzo Council (Samuel K. Jackson) questions
Martin, sensing she hasn't told him the whole story. Only later does she confess that her
four-year-old son was asleep in the back seat of the car. Council considers the projects
to be his professional "turf;" he knows the residents, they know him,
and a level of trust has been established.
But Martin's brother, Danny (Ron Eldard), a Gannon police detective
with a violent streak, rallies his forces and puts Armstrong on "lockdown,"
ironically, a prison term now applied to a ghetto project. A line of
plastic-shield-holding cops faces the anger and resentments of the residents.
Confrontation leads to violence.
Moore (The Prize Winner of Defiance, Ohio, The Forgotten) is riveting in an
intense performance. Long, stringy blond hair and puffy eyes underline her agitated
condition, her self-destructive impulses and her near hysterical emotional state. Jackson
(Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith,
The Caveman’s Valentine)
thoroughly inhabits the Council role which is given some interesting complexities. He has
a son in prison, serving time for armed robbery; he's asthmatic. He's also a decent human
being who cares both about the folks in the projects and about Martin. There's a powerful
onscreen connect between these two characters that keeps the film interesting and tends to
override its shortcomings.
Screenwriter Richard Price adapted his own best-selling novel, a
daunting task in view of its over 700 pages (in the paperback edition), but he doesn't
succeed in meshing its pieces into a satisfying whole. The carjacking side of the plot
seems to run parallel, rather than to be integral, to the issues of racism and hostility
between the two communities. The story is telescoped; any attentive viewer will be able to
figure out, well in advance, where it is going. There's little then in the way of
suspense, although the lead performances, the direction (Joe Roth), and the musical score
(James Newton Howard) all contribute to a high level of tension. The secondary characters
are woefully underdeveloped. Edie Falco (The
Sopranos, Sunshine State)
as a missing-child activist and Eldard (House of Sand and Fog, Black Hawk Down) never advance
beyond two dimensional characterizations. (And how did Danny ever get away with sending
his cops into another town's jurisdiction? Credulity is stretched way out on that point.)
Still, Moore and Jackson are in top form and hold the attention
throughout. They make you wish that Freedomland had a tighter screenplay.
- Arthur Lazere
