Ever since Julianne Moore replaced Jodie Foster as Clarice Starling in Hannibal, the two actresses seem to be following similar career paths. Both have been playing steely moms in peril lately, Foster in Flightplan and Moore in The Forgotten. Freedomland once again finds Moore as a determined mother whose child has gone missing, although this time it's played for serious social drama rather than the supernatural mumbo jumbo of The Forgotten.
Not that it makes the film much better. Freedomland is just as unsubtle, as histrionic as The Forgotten was, without the advantage of cool effects of people getting sucked into the sky. Moore is teacher Brenda Martin, who wanders, hands bloody, into a hospital in New Jersey claiming that she was just carjacked and her attacker took off with her 4-year-old son still in the car. Brenda describes the attacker simply as a "black man" who assaulted her while she was driving through the predominantly black (and poor) New Jersey town of Dempsy, back to her home in the predominantly white neighboring town of Gannon.
Dempsy police detective Lorenzo Council (Samuel L. Jackson), who has strong ties to the Armstrong housing project where Brenda says she was attacked, takes on the case, which soon causes simmering racial tensions to rise to the surface, as the Gannon police get involved, locking down the housing project and harassing local residents. It doesn't help that Brenda's brother (Ron Eldard) is a detective on the Gannon police force.
Based on a novel by Richard Price and very loosely inspired by the case of Susan Smith, who in 1994 drowned her two children and then claimed that a black man had carjacked her, Freedomland is overblown and predictable, especially if you have any knowledge of the events it parallels. In adapting his 700-page novel for the screen, Price has made numerous cuts, and what's left is a fairly bare-bones story populated by stereotypical characters (irony alert!).
Moore, who's usually a measured and accomplished actress, gives a hysterical and increasingly irritating performance as Brenda, who sobs and whines selfishly throughout the film while never engendering much sympathy. Jackson plays the same dignified badass he's essayed countless times; when Lorenzo admonishes someone to "kiss [his] black ass," you have to wonder if the line was contractually obligated.
The main problem with Freedomland is that Price and director Joe Roth (whose recent work includes such probing dramas as Christmas with the Kranks and America's Sweethearts) are unable to connect the kidnapping storyline with the racial tension storyline in any meaningful way. Whenever we're away from the unrest in the projects, following Brenda's anguish, it's as if the other issues don't exist. Even though Brenda works with children in the very neighborhood that's the focus of the investigation, she doesn't feel like part of what goes on there.
The filmmakers also too easily give in to clichés, with the residents of the housing project rioting seemingly within hours of the police setting up shop in their neighborhood, and white-trash Brenda with a drug problem in her past and some seriously bad taste in men. Rather than examine the way that prejudice informs people's actions in situations like this, Freedomland is content to simply throw the same racial stereotypes it's purporting to challenge up on the screen without much in the way of comment.
Jackson is the film's saving grace, mostly because this is a role he's played so many times that he can't possibly screw it up. Everything else, though, is bungled just enough to make Freedomland a disappointing glimpse at what could have been.