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A white mother (Julianne Moore) who works in the projects wanders into the police precinct looking for help and sympathy. She is distraught and despondent and tells an obtuse tale of how a black man from the projects stole her car at gunpoint and drove off with her son asleep in the backseat.
Her brother, a cop, takes a small force into the projects and shuts the place down to rattle some cages. The projects erupt in violence and standoffs with the police. Trying to stem the outrage of the rioting residents and to calm the rise of their war with the men in uniform, a police detective (Samuel L. Jackson) steps in to solve the crime.
Director Joe Roth attempts to take the same themes dealt with so intimately in Crash and escalate them to a much broader scale in Freedomland. Unfortunately, he doesn’t succeed. It comes off as incredibly forced, and at times the participants in the escalation seem to overplay their own outrage.
The pacing of the film is dreadfully slow. With all that is going on, the director concentrates on areas of disinterest. It seems like he is trying to create a vehicle for the actors to dig into rather than make something an audience can watch. The background is set and so he lets several characters go on long monologues for several minutes.
The actors do quite well overall. Samuel L. Jackson is always good, and Edie Falco, as a mother who once lost her son to violent crime and offers her help to Samuel, is just sheer perfection in her part. Even Julianne Moore does a very good job. I don’t fault her acting for instantly hating her character. Her part is written in such a way that you don’t sympathize with her as much as you are annoyed by her.
Moore’s character is the catalyst for destruction, and so she takes the brunt of the negative feelings the audience may feel when watching the film. But there are three things I can’t excuse. One is that her character is so outright annoying at times with her ignorant and obtuse meanderings that you just want to slap her. The second is that no one is surprised by the “twist” ending of the film itself. It’s so clear from the very beginning that when the surprise comes, you yawn in agreement.
The last thing I can’t excuse is the way that all the cops are portrayed as bigoted morons except for the Samuel L. Jackson’s character. It wouldn’t be that bad except that it is a painfully obvious way to manipulate an audience.
Overall, you walk out of the theater pissed off and annoyed—not my idea of a grand day out at the theater. Save your money. Stay home and watch Crash instead.
