Directed by Joe Roth
Written by Richard Price
Starring Samuel L Jackson, Julianne Moore, Edie Falco, Ron Eldard, Anthony Mackie, Aunjanue Ellis, and William Forsythe.
Sometimes there are films that try too hard to be both entertaining and meaningful at the same time. A lot of the time such films apart as a result of their own ambition. Freedomland is such a film.
Freedomland starts with a caption stating the place and time in which the tale is being presented. It is May 1999 in two suburban areas of New Jersey divided by race. A distraught white mother played by Julianne Moore walks into a hospital in the rough part of town with cuts on her hand. She’s crying and looks lost. As she is being treated for her injury, she encounters a black police officer played by Samuel L. Jackson. He is there to listen to her story. She was carjacked while taking a shortcut to get home and needs to file a report. Jackson takes her statement and finds out that there is something else happening. A child is missing.
From this point, the movie starts to examine the social situation of how the race of a crime victim plays a role that either dictates guilt or innocence. Moore’s character has a brother played by Ron Eldard in the neighboring police force in the majority white town and the police department sweeps in and declares martial law in the majority black town in order to find the missing child. Volence explodes as the tensions between the two cultures collide in misguided efforts to save a life.
The story gets murkier when a group of volunteer mothers led by Edie Falco enter the story. Their one desire is to find a lost child dead or alive. The search and the lingering questions start wrapping and twisting themselves into barely recognizable figments of activity that takes the audience to a place no one would expect. When Freedomland reaches its end point, it’s hard not to feel scammed of watching a movie that it sold itself as one film, but it gives another story entirely.
Richard Price’s script, based on his novel, is ambitious in the amount it wants to cover. It has a speed that disorients from the moment the film starts and it does not let up in the confusion. Joe Roth’s direction relies on quiet moments to signify importance and reverence to the big picture issue at hand. The audience will come out of the film knowing that racism is bad. That is a no-brainer. The way it is communicated is a bit heavy handed, but it works in relation to the blue collar cultures involved in the characters location indicates.
The acting ranged from the impressive to the pitiful. Jackson’s role as the investigator jumped through all the traditional cop hoops, yet he still carried more heart than the film deserved. Julianne Moore needs to stay away from roles as a mother who loses her child in strange unexplained manners. Those roles are so easy to overact and her performance in Freedomlandis almost laughable. Edie Falco had a role that should’ve been more emotional, but she acted the role with the emotion of a piece of furniture. Everyone else in the film was nonexistent and served as a prop to a great Samuel L Jackson piece and a wretched attempt at acting from Julianne Moore.
Freedomland is a film with great ambition. However, its ambition was derailed by the lack of breath, space, and supporting structure in the writing and acting.
- Francis Davis a career drunk with a love of comics and movies, lives in and works for the City of Chicago. Confidentiality agreements prevent him from saying exactly what he does, but it is important.