Freedomland

Directed By Joe Roth

Sony Pictures Releasing

2 Stars



This is an attempt at a hard-hitting racial melodrama. From Joe Roth, the director of “Christmas With the Kranks” and “America’s Sweethearts.”

At least it’s written by Richard Price, who wrote the scripts for “Clockers,” “Shaft,” and adapted his own novel for this film. He knows his shit.

Unfortunately, his influence and provocative ambitions are not enough to save this from family drama flopdom, a category most aptly represented by John Travolta’s “Domestic Disturbance.”

The story begins... in New Jersey. Dun, dun, dun. Therein, Brenda Martin (Julianne Moore, “The Hours”) walks into a hospital and says that her car has been car jacked in the local projects. And her son was inside. Or so she tells Detective Lorenzo Council (Samuel L. Jackson, “Pulp Fiction”) the bad-ass police officer, whose beat includes that project.

The police—led by Brenda’s brother (Ron Eldard, “Black Hawk Down”)—immediately decide to blockade the projects until the denizens give up the ‘jacker of their own volition. Their logic is impeccable—apparently this happened once before. So it’s sure to happen again.

As Council investigates, the situation in the projects gets more and more combustible, with racist white cops on one side and vaguely offensive straw-men of feisty blacks on the other. And then, that plot line sort of disappears just in time for “The Soprano’s” Edie Falco to arrive as the leader of a group of mothers who organize hunts for missing children. Falco has the magic power of importing hundreds of volunteers on a moments notice.

She might have been an interesting character in a novel. Not here. As questions about Brenda’s sanity continue to mount, a discerning viewer of crap-tacular melodrama will remember Moore’s similar role (child is abducted and no one is sure that the mother is telling the truth about the abduction) in the Roth-produced “The Forgotten.” But that abduction was done by aliens. There are no aliens here. Just Moore’s shaky Jersey accent.

Although I was initially intrigued by the racial politics, the political points about police brutality fade into cardboard cut-outs behind the main plot of Moore’s weeping, unstable mother. Viewers don’t take it any more seriously than the movie does. And the movie does not give the real issues the weight they deserve.

The resolution bothered me the most: in its attempt to be hard-hitting, it ends up feeling exploitative of the racial dynamics and the tragic death of children.

No characters are multi-dimensional. The males in the projects are lazy, unemployed, oversexed stereotypes, or Al Sharpton imitators. The females are “ghetto-fabulous” shrillers. The cops are stupid, blatantly racist pigs. It’s a wonder anything gets done in this city. Ah, Jersey.

Jackson is decent, but the role is nothing he hasn’t done before. And better. Even within Jackson’s confused-cop-dealing-with-a-troubled-woman-in-an-exploitation-flick oeuvre, pick up Phillip Kaufman’s “Twisted” instead. And it is a sad day when that is the better choice.

The biggest fault lies in the direction. Roth just doesn’t maintain tension; he fades from a race riot to a vision of Jackson’s inner child. Or his actual child. It’s not clear.

Although it is nice that Hollywood is addressing racial politics in a thriller rather than the occasional liberal-soothing polemic like “Crash,” modern race relations demands a focused narrative and an intelligent directorial hand.

Bottom line: Roth has none of the skills to fulfill the ambitions of the work—just an obsession with casting Julianne Moore as a mother searching for her lost child. And damn it Joe, that’s not good enough!



--Staff writer Scoop A. Wasserstein can be reached at wasserst@fas.harvard.edu.