Freedomland (film)
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| Freedomland | |
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| Directed by | Joe Roth |
| Produced by | Scott Rudin |
| Written by | Richard Price |
| Starring | Samuel L. Jackson Julianne Moore Edie Falco Ron Eldard William Forsythe |
| Music by | James Newton Howard |
| Distributed by | Columbia Pictures |
| Release date(s) | 17 February 2006 (USA) |
| Running time | 112 mins |
| Language | English |
| IMDb profile | |
Freedomland is a 2006 film starring Samuel L. Jackson and Julianne Moore. Richard Price adapted his own novel, which touches on themes of covert racism. Joe Roth directs the film.
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[edit] Plot
The movie opens with Brenda (Julianne Moore) wandering through the Projects at night. She gets to the hospital, goes into the emergency room and takes her hands out of her pockets. They’re cut to pieces and all bloody.
Next, we meet Lorenzo (Samuel L. Jackson), a cop, and his partner who are trying to pick up a guy on a warrant from the next town. He gets a call about seeing Brenda to take a report on her stolen car, and he heads for the hospital.
Brenda is pretty shell-shocked and it takes a while, but she finally reveals that Cody, her four-year-old son was in the backseat of her car. Lorenzo reacts to this with an asthma attack and the doctor has to give him a shot. It’s also revealed that Brenda's brother is a cop in the next town - a predominately white town.
The search begins. Brenda’s brother goes overboard and calls every cop car to seal up the projects and look for clues. Tensions get high as the media goes wild. Lorenzo takes Brenda home, but he suspects that there’s something she’s not telling him. After dropping her off at her place, he starts to drive home and realizes he’s being followed. He pulls over and finds out it’s a volunteer group that helps look for missing kids. He declines their help and goes home.
The next day, he visits his son - who’s in jail. Then he checks the situation. Brenda has helped a sketch artist do a rendering of the colored man who took her car.
There’s still no sign of Cody and tensions are going through the roof around the projects. Lorenzo again asks Brenda what really happened to Cody and she pleads with him to believe her, that Cody is her life and she would never hurt him. She goes by the day care center where she works and the children try to cheer her up. As she’s leaving, a mother tells her to stay away from her child.
The white town’s cops show up at the projects and arrest a man. They work him over pretty good, drag him back to the precinct and hold up the drawing of the wanted man. He kinds of looks like the sketch. They start to question him when Lorenzo and Brenda’s brother show up. The brother goes thermal and pounds the guy; the cops have to drag them apart. Lorenzo leaves in disgust and runs into his partner outside. Realizing that the case will be turned over to the feds, Lorenzo asks his partner to stall them for one more day.
That night, the police make their presence known in the projects. Things are close to exploding and Lorenzo begs the cops to stand down, let tempers cool. However, several tenants don’t, and the situation erupts into a full-scale riot. Fires are set, people beaten, cops jumped and arrests made everywhere.
Lorenzo calls in the volunteer group and suggests they search Freedomland. It’s the site of an old foundlings’ home - abandoned for years - and the only place in the area that a small child could wander or hide for some time. They also feel that taking Brenda there will get the truth out of her via the psychological impact of the place.
The searchers gather and Lorenzo learns that their leader lost her son about ten years before. As they search, she talks to Brenda. She tells her how she wishes she knew where her son was, how she knows who did it, but can’t prove it. She runs through (several times!) what she would like to say to the man to get him to tell her where the body is. Gradually, she shifts the context of the sentence to asking Brenda.
Brenda cracks and tells them this is the wrong place. She leads them to a shallow grave covered with heavy rocks. Cody is buried there. Lorenzo calls in the forensic team. He couldn't help but wonder how Brenda could move such heavy boulders.
Lorenzo takes her back to the police department and they talk. Brenda was having an affair with a man from the projects and would feed Cody cough syrup to get him to sleep, so she could have sex with the man without interruption. She told him it was liquid vitamins. One night, Cody wouldn’t go down and they had a fight. Brenda walked out to see the man - even though she knew it wasn’t for sex, it was to break it up. When she returned, she found Cody dead under the table. He’d overdosed on the cough syrup. When Brenda realized what happened, she lost it, not knowing what to do. She drove out to the woods and dug his grave with her bare hands. Then she called her (old) boyfriend and asked him to help. He carried Cody out there, buried him and put the rocks over the grave - both as a tribute and to keep animals away. Both he and Brenda are taken away.
Lorenzo visits Brenda in prison and tells her to channel her grief into something positive - helping other prisoners etc. Then he visits his son and breaks down into tears.
[edit] Release and reaction
Originally believed to be an Oscar contender, Freedomland was set for release on December 25th, 2005. However, after negative test screenings, it was moved back to a lower-profile release date of February 17th, 2006. It was advertised as a thriller in the vein of Julianne Moore's previous hit The Forgotten, but this approach did not help the film's reception. Critics hated it for the most part, most citing Moore's overacting and the contrived storyline as its main flaws. The New York Times especially hated the film, calling it "an early contender for the worst film of the year." However, Edie Falco did receive some praise for her supporting role. Audiences did not respond well either. When it finally left theaters, it had only grossed around $12.6 million at the U.S. box office.
[edit] Trivia
- The story is inspired by the 1994 case of Susan Smith who maintained that a black man had stolen her car with her sons in the backseat, until mounting evidence led to her confession for their murder.
