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'Freedomland' explores preconceptions, racial tensions

Ripped from the headlines and synthesized into powerful fiction with a sobering message on the racial gulf that continues to divide us, Freedomland is a well-acted, thinking person's police procedural film.

It turns the trick of being able to build tension, even though there is little suspense about what really happened on the night Brenda Martin (a bedraggled Julianne Moore) claims her car was hijacked by a black man, with her young son asleep in the back seat.

Sony Pictures 'Freedomland' B+ The verdict: A thinking person's crime story, a suspicious abduction case set amid the racial tensions of low-income housing. Director: Joe Roth Starring: Samuel L. Jackson, Julianne Moore, Edith Falco, Ron Eldard, William Forsythe Run time: 113 minutes Release date: Feb. 17, 2006 Rating: R for language and some violent content. See showtimes On the web Official movie site View the trailer    Trailers require Quicktime Rate 'Freedomland'   Go see it   Make it a matinee   Wait to rent   Don't bother Voter Limit: Once per Hour View Poll Results

Richard Price adapts his own novel into a taut drama that surely owes its genesis to the Medea-like Susan Smith, who claimed her sons were abducted and drowned by a black man, and the earlier case of Charles Stuart, who insisted that his pregnant wife was killed by a black assailant. Price adds in a well-meaning, but bone-weary police detective, Lorenzo Council (Samuel L. Jackson), who instinctively perceives that former drug addict Brenda is lying.

Patiently, he tries to retrace the events of that night, even as the largely black low-income housing project in Dempsy, N.J. — the same town of Price's 1995 Clockers — threatens to explode. Lorenzo is well-respected among the denizens of the Armstrong Houses, but a lockdown only inflames the situation, as does Brenda's hot-headed cop brother (Ron Eldard) from the neighboring white, but blue-collar, town.

Eventually, the story turns on the intervention of a volunteer group, Friends of Kent, that assists in searches for missing children. The force behind these well-meaning women with their own agenda is founder Karen Collucci (The Sopranos' Edie Falco), whose son has been unaccounted for for the past 10 years. She leads the search for Brenda's son to the abandoned grounds of a home for disabled children called Freedomland, where matters grow murkier.

Directing the film with a gritty assurance is Joe Roth, a surprising follow-up to his sour, unfunny comedy Christmas with the Kranks. There is substance in Freedomland, but it is essentially a tone piece which could have easily slipped into the realm of a made-for-cable movie, but Roth saves it from that fate with his tough, stark hand.

The movie is also elevated out of the ordinary by its performances, most notably Moore as the deeply disturbed Brenda, who spends much of the film in a fog of despair, which is too convincing to be fabricated. Jackson has his best role in a while as Lorenzo, the only voice of reason in a mounting racial crisis, a man who thinks he understands what happened, but also knows he is racing a mob's deadline to prove it. Falco is their equal as the somber activist whose trawling for missing children has taken its toll on her. She radiates an intensity that suggests she should be able to forge a film career with little difficulty.

Freedomland refuses to settle for tidy answers or a reassuring resolution. Coming from a major studio, it apparently slipped under the scrutiny of marketers and audience testing to be released with its power undiluted.

Here is a movie for those looking for more than mere entertainment, a small film about large issues, so well executed that it deserves to find an audience.