There are at least two or three interesting stories that bump up against each other like strangers in the night and never quite gel in the overstuffed and undercooked drama Freedomland. Each of these stories contains moments worth watching, but none of the individual tales is strong enough to carry the entire movie, and the connections between them mostly boil down to a matter of literary convenience.
On one hand, you have the racial tensions complicating the investigation of the reported abduction of a white child in a black neighborhood in New Jersey. On the other hand, you have a character study of the missing child's mother, a flakey ex-junkie played with blotchy, white trash gusto by Julianne Moore. And then there's the story of the investigating detective (Samuel L. Jackson), a well-intentioned black cop who's trying to play both sides of the racial divide, and who has one or two secrets of his own.
Freedomland was scripted by Richard Price (Clockers, Ransom, Mad Dog and Glory) and, as in all the screenwriter's projects, each of the characters is given his or her share of long-winded, heavy-handed monologues that seem better suited to the stage than the screen, and that wind up stopping the film dead in its tracks. Scattershot direction that veers from clichéd you-are-there shaky-cam (for crowd scenes) to static faux-stage set-ups (for the periodic big speeches) doesn't help the movie's sense of coherency.
Things take an even more unsatisfying turn at the midpoint, when Freedomland drops the ball on its racial angle and turns its attentions to the back stories of a group of concerned women also searching for the missing child. Price and director Joe Roth eventually attempt to fuse all of their disparate elements into a rambling lament for abused and neglected children everywhere, but by this point the movie is already 20 minutes too long, and none of it is particularly convincing. Also stars Edie Falco (barely recognizable sans make-up and blonde hair) and Ron Eldard.
This article appears in Feb 15-21, 2006.