There’s a missing 4-year-old at the center of this cockeyed kidnapping caper, but what’s also conspicuously absent is the slightest semblance of restraint. It speaks volumes about the overwrought development of plot and character that the most moderated performance in director Joe Roth’s film is delivered by the notoriously histrionic Samuel L. Jackson (as man-of-the-poor-people police detective Lorenzo Council). Jackson’s co-star, Julianne Moore, offers an uncharacteristically hollow reading as the traumatized single mother who ignites a full-blown racial conflict when she claims, and not very convincingly, that her child was abducted by an African-American carjacker. The premise is unoriginal (remember Susan Smith?), and the statements Roth and “Clockers” scribe Richard Price (who adapted for the screen from his novel) attempt to make on race relations in America also seem like warmed-over bits from Spike Lee’s far superior “Do the Right Thing.”
Moore’s Brenda Martin is totally unglued from the moment we meet her and remains so throughout the movie, making it nearly impossible to discern a real person to empathize with beneath the over-the-top hysterics. Moore’s weepy, wobbly woman in peril is the stuff of caricature, not character, and it represents a low point in an otherwise impressive career. She’s got company, too. There’s little joy in watching Ron Eldard ineffectively ape Sean Penn’s searing “Mystic River” performance, playing Brenda’s raw nerve of a police detective brother. Edie Falco’s turn as the leader of community group that finds missing children is overly constrained, though to her credit she comes correct in the film’s most convincing scene, in which she dredges up memories of her own painful past in an effort to cajole Brenda into confessing complicity in her child’s disappearance. Too bad that memorable moment doesn’t arrive for nearly 90 minutes, long after the point where “Freedomland” lost its way. (RATED R. RUNNING TIME: 102 MINUTES)
Originally published in the Santa Monica Daily Press print edition on February 17, 2006. Read the original PDF.