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Freedomland

2006, Movie, R, 115 mins

Freedomland: Review

FREEDOMLAND
starstarstarstar
Hugely ambitious and driven by Julianne Moore, Samuel L. Jackson and Edie Falco's fine, intense performances, Richard Price's adaptation of his own sprawling novel about a racially charged kidnapping that turns a volatile New Jersey town into a powder keg tries to tell too many stories in too little time. The nightmare begins when bloodied, near-hysterical Brenda Martin (Moore) stumbles into a Dempsey hospital claiming she was carjacked by a black man in the nearby Armstrong projects, where she works at a day-care center. Dempsey detective Lorenzo Council (Jackson) knows her story doesn't add up: She only reluctantly admits that her 4-year-old son, Cody, was asleep in the backseat and can't come up with a convincing explanation as to why a white woman from neighboring Gannon, a largely white and blue-collar town, was driving around a crime-ridden Dempsey housing project in the middle of the night with her sick, pajama-clad child. Complicating matters further, Council has spent years cultivating relationships with the impoverished Armstrong community; Brenda's brother Danny (Ron Eldard), a Gannon PD detective, starts throwing his weight around; and Brenda herself has a convoluted personal history that includes drug abuse. Knowing that Cody's disappearance is ripe to become a media free-for-all, the Dempsey police lock down the Armstrong development in the hopes of flushing out the kidnapper. The father in Lorenzo sympathizes with the clearly distraught Brenda: He knows about parental guilt, having neglected his own son and seen him grow up into an angry, aimless, undisciplined tough guy who wound up in jail. But the cop in Lorenzo knows that when a child goes missing, the person who reported the disappearance usually had a hand in it. As Armstrong's tenants seethe and the media lurk outside the no-go zone, Lorenzo tries to coax the truth out of Brenda before a race riot erupts. With time running short, he enlists the aid of a parents group called Friends of Kent, who help locate missing and abducted children, and in particular the group's dogged founder, Karen Collucci (Falco), herself the mother of a never-recovered child. Though director Joe Roth keeps the heat turned up, the film feels like a sketch for a richer, more thoroughly developed story — one like the Price-Spike Lee collaboration CLOCKERS (1995), also set in and around the fictional Armstrong Houses. Despite the hot-button issues and go-for-broke emoting, FREEDOMLAND ultimately feels didactic rather than urgent. leave a comment --Maitland McDonagh
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