Cinematical

I'm not really sure how to characterize Freedomland. Marketed as a mystery-thriller, it doesn't quite manage to be either. The script is a mess, badly lacking in three rather crucial elements: plot, substance, and character development. This leaves the key cast - Samuel L. Jackson, Julianne Moore, and Edie Falco - to basically spin golden characters out of flimsy straw material. The film is also badly lacking in direction and focus; I don't know what director Joe Roth was doing for most of the shoot, but the scatter shot effectiveness of the end result leaves me thinking he took a lot of coffee breaks.

Here's the framework of the film: a white woman (Moore) is found in a hospital emergency room, hands badly cut and bleeding, and claiming to have been carjacked (by the ubiquitous nondescript black man) as she was on her way out of the dangerous Armstrong housing project neighborhood. The cop assigned to preserve and protect Armstrong, Lorenzo Council (Jackson), is well-liked and respected by the project's residents. He is called to the hospital to take a statement from the carjack victim, but quickly two things become clear: the woman, Brenda, is a recovered drug addict who may or may not have been in the projects for an unsavory reason; and she is not telling everything she knows - not even close.  She finally reveals her four-year-old son, Cody, was in the back seat of the car, asleep.

Things propel into fast-motion, with Lorenzo interrogating Brenda in between trying to get a hit off his empty inhaler, as he starts having a major asthma attack. This scene is badly edited  - Lorenzo is getting more and more agitated, Brenda more and more upset, and the way the scene is shot, with emotion in overdrive and lots of back-and-forth agonizing close-ups - just ends up  feeling disjointed. Brenda's next revelation is the linchpin for the second part of the story: her brother is a detective with the police department in Gannon, an adjacent town with whose cops Lorenzo and the other cops on his beat have a long-standing rivalry. Lorenzo calls in a missing child abducted in a carjacking near the Armstrong project - the nephew of a Gannon detective - and faster than you can say "Rodney King riots", the Gannon cops are over the line, barricading the Armstrong tenants in a lock-down until they tell what they know about the carjacking and the missing child.

As things heat up and racial tension threatens to overspill into all-out riot, Lorenzo turns the heat up on Brenda, whom he still suspects is not telling the truth. He finds himself working with a group of mothers called "Mothers for Kent" led by Karen Collucci (Edie Falco), a mother whose son disappeared and has never been found. The women work with police and parents of missing children to help break tough cases. Falco's wrenching, beautifully understated performance as a mother so immersed in grief she has sacrificed her surviving children and husband to find other people's missing kids, is the single best thing about this film.

The script is schizophrenic and frantic - it just  doesn't know what it wants to be when it grows up. Is it a mystery-thriller about a missing four-year-old boy? Not really - there's neither mystery nor much thrill to rely on. Is it a compelling study of race relations and the tension caused by a housing project lock down in the quest to find a missing white child, when the same project received minimal police attention for the three residents under 18 murdered there in the past year? Freedomland succeeds marginally better on this level - you could palpably feel the tension rise in the theater during the scenes of conflict between the locked-down residents and police in riot gear.  The theme of race-relations and police tension has been done better in countless other films, though, with more dramatic tension and emotional subtlety. The two plot threads are tied together tenuously, and then cobbled with a third subplot involving a young couple from the Armstong project that ends up just feeling contrived. There are moments (quite a few, unfortunately) that feel like the script started out longer and got hacked, with relevant bits and pieces being excised in the process.

The strength of the film lies in its cast - and they are a talented group - but they are mostly left to gamely do their best with what they have to work with. Julianne Moore is getting plenty of practice in roles as the bereft mother of a disappeared child who may or may not be off her rocker (see her previous work in The Forgotten, another mediocre film, not coincidentally produced by Roth). Moore is a fine actress, and she gives it her all here, playing the distraught mother of a missing child to the hilt, but at times she's overreaching; her performance in Freedomland lacks the authentic emotional depth of her work in better films like Far From Heaven, The Hours, and The Prize Winner of Defiance Ohio. Jackson, of course, could stand in front of a green screen reading from the phone book for 90 minutes and be entertaining, but even so his performance, too, felt a little off, like he was reaching for something that just wasn't there. Falco, as aforesaid, is the best thing about Freedomland - her intense moments on screen ring more true than anything else in the film.

If you go into Freedomland without your expectations too buoyed by the casting, you might enjoy it somewhat. Audiences are most likely to get something out of the film by strictly viewing it as an interesting psychological character study of how each of the three main characters responds differently to the loss of a child, rather than expecting to see that  "mystery thriller" that simply isn't there.