The ironically titled Freedomland deals
with a situation resembling the sensational stories that scream from the front
pages every day and absolutely absorb the drooling forensic ghouls of the cable
news channels. The movie examines such volatile contemporary materials as a
missing child, a black suspect, racial tensions, the enormous distance
separating comfortable suburbia from urban housing projects, police treatment
of minorities, and the sheer heartbreak involved in the search for the truth of
any crime.
The picture opens with a distraught
woman, Brenda Martin (Julianne Moore), staggering into an emergency room, her
hands bleeding profusely, reporting that her 4-year-old son, Cody, has been
abducted in a carjacking. Her account, the subsequent investigation, and the
publicity surrounding them inflame a smoldering hostility between inhabitants
of a project in her New Jersey
community and some misguided policemen, ultimately igniting something like a
full blown riot.
She tells Detective Lorenzo Council
(Samuel L. Jackson) that a young black man carjacked her vehicle near the housing
project, accidentally abducting her son, asleep in the back seat. Her hotheaded
brother, a detective in a suburban police force, brings his colleagues into the
problem, intending to find his nephew by locking down
the project, which of course simply exacerbates a tense situation. Besides
searching for the lost boy, Council must try to calm both sides and convince
his supervisors of the validity of his own investigation.
Detective Council’s search for
answers leads him into the life of the grieving mother, who fears, along with
everyone else, that her child may be dead. In a series of anguished speeches,
she tells him about the circumstances of her past, her previous drug addiction,
her work in the project’s own school, and the depth of her devotion to her
child. As she says, Cody allowed her to be born, giving new meaning and purpose
to her life.
Despite his sympathy for the mother
and his understanding of her plight — he has in effect also lost a son,
imprisoned for armed robbery — the detective senses something wrong with her
story. Her account and her reactions to his interrogation don’t quite add up
and she keeps breaking down into hysterics and self destructive behaviors when
he questions her closely. To solve the mystery he enlists the help of an
informal organization of women who search for missing children when everyone
else has given up.
When that group
enters the search for Cody, the film moves into the dark territory of guilt and
desperation. The leader, Karen Collucci (Edie Falco), whose son was murdered 10 years earlier, questions
Brenda indirectly, telling her own history and painfully eliciting the full
account of the night of Cody’s disappearance. The result, somehow shocking yet
not surprising, leads to a final sad revelation, a solution that represents
more of a defeat than a triumph for the detective.
Aside from its presentation of a
sadly familiar story and a mystery of the sort that cops deal with all the
time, Freedomland shows not so much the excitement as the utter sadness of everyday criminal
investigation. The detective in this cop movie finds only what he expects, not
an answer to a puzzle, but an affirmation of his disbelief in the possibility
of human goodness. He understands that his profession is a vocation of unhappiness,
uncovering truths he would rather not know, finding his own anguish in the
suffering of others.
Julianne Moore looks wan and
disheveled, entirely unglamourous, throughout the
movie, but lays on the hysteria with a shovel, so that her set speeches seem
increasingly a series of self pitying whines.
On the other hand, Edie Falco conveys the genuine emotion of an ordinary woman who
has suffered the worst loss imaginable with terrific control; she and Jackson
communicate almost entirely with only a few words, a glance, a nod, a
tightening of the lips, telling each other and the audience the full extent of
what they discover without the need of any prosaic explanation. Her appearance
in the film even quiets Jackson’s
occasional excess, so that their work together creates the central
relationship, the connection that reveals the full depth of its terrible
heartbreak.
Freedomland (R), screenplay by Richard Price, based on his novel; directed by Joe Roth, is
playing at Culver Ridge, Henrietta 18, Pittsford Plaza, Tinseltown, and Webster
12.
This article appears in Feb 22-28, 2006.
