Dumdumland

Noel Vera

It's hard to guess what kind of thinking went into the making of
this particular car crash. "We'll take Richard Price's novel and
turn it into a movie," someone must have said. "But that's heavy
stuff," his boss would reply; "how do you make child abduction and
abuse commercial and entertaining?" "Easy--we get Samuel Jackson to
play a Bad Motherfucker who gets all righteous (in the biblical
sense) on the abductors'/abusers' ass." "But who do you get to play
the mother?" "Julianne Moore--she's beautiful even when she's not
trying to be glamorous, she wins the audience's sympathy right off,
and she's a terrific actress, all in a single, sexy package."

If it were only that easy. "Freedomland" (the movie, anyway) takes
those oh, so unpalatable themes of child abuse and child abduction
and gives them, well, some kind of treatment--exactly what it's
somewhat difficult to describe. It's like an oversized, ultra-angst-
y version of an episode of "Hill Street Blues" or "Law and Order,"
with the Social Topic of the Day being given a dramatic once-over,
only "Hill" and its various progeny might have done more justice to
the subject, what with their way of devoting several episodes or
even the course of an entire season to developing (and sometimes not
resolving) a storyline. "Freedomland" has to compress a 500-page
hardbound novel into a hundred and thirteen minutes, and the result
is shorter, louder, shriller.

Little details stick out and bother you, like when Brenda Martin
(Julianne Moore), shows up at a hospital with shredded hands and
claims she'd been carjacked in the woods near a low-cost housing
project; Detective Lorenzo Council (Samuel Jackson) writes up her
report, but finds plenty of inconsistencies and loopholes in her
story; what, for one, was she doing in that area at that time of the
night? Why is she so hysterical? Apparently Brenda has failed to
mention (tried but failed in what, on the big screen, plays out
almost like a comedy routine) one little detail: her four-year-old
son was in the back seat, asleep. Wouldn't most mothers tell it the
other way around? "My son was kidnapped! Oh, and my car got stolen."

Council goes berserk, making phone calls left and right, yelling at
everyone within earshot (a considerable distance), and finding
himself on the verge of an asthma attack (what a time for an inhaler
to run out!). Does he, on the basis of her erratic behavior and
incoherent testimony, suspect that she's on drugs--perhaps making
the whole thing up? A cordon is thrown up around an entire
neighborhood, keeping the residents--all black--inside, unable to
leave; is such a thing possible, and on such doubtful evidence? Both
picture and novel were inspired from the true story of Susan Smith,
a Southern woman who blamed a black man for stealing her car with
her two sons inside (she had rolled the car into a lake, drowning
both children, in an insane effort to please her boyfriend); the
accusation did result in heightened racial tensions, but not this
kind of spectacular show of police force--I would imagine you'd need
more than the testimony of a clearly spaced-out woman to set up that
kind of blockade, and maintain it for days afterwards. How on earth
do they get to eat? Have their garbage collected? Account for all
the jobs they can't go to?

Price isn't known for his lack of realism. In the novel he can get
away with such a huge undertaking and make it at least halfway
believable, thanks to the amount of time and detail he's able to
accumulate; on film it's thrown up with few questions asked, during
or after the encirclement. Later Council is able to organize a
massive manhunt, and in the ostensibly wrong place, just to play out
some hunch he has (a hunch that should have been obvious to everyone
involved from the first ten minutes). Even later Council and Martin
have a confrontation where she all but throws herself on him, and he
pats her chastely like the daughter he never had (even this side of
the millennium you simply can't have sexual attraction play out its
normal course in a racially mixed cast, not in Hollywood).

Longtime producer Joe Roth (some of his best efforts--you might say
his only worthwhile projects--include David Cronenberg's "Dead
Ringers" (1988) and Paul Mazursky's "Enemies: A Love Story" (1989))
directs the picture as if his audience were pimply teenagers--all
flashy cuts, swishing camera moves and ponderous music score--and he
was afraid to lose hold over what little attention span they had
left. Worse, he manages to coax Moore, arguably one of the finest
actresses working in Hollywood at the moment, into giving one of her
worse performances ever (a strong contender was in Paul Thomas
Anderson's three-hour 1999 pseudo-epic "Magnolia" (where she plays
yet another drug addict--a trend here, perhaps?)). Maybe the only
one who emerges with his dignity more or less intact is Samuel
Jackson; his Lorenzo Council may be thickheaded and implausible (Why
does he extend all that freedom and trust to a crackhead?), and you
wonder at that asthma business, but he's still a compelling
presence, huge eyes, grim mouth, booming voice and all. Sometimes
Jackson's tightened mouth provides the only sign of recognizably
human emotion onscreen; he looks as if he wanted to sound off in a
bad way about just how awful this picture is, but is contractually
obligated to hold his tongue.

(First appeared in Businessworld, 8/18/06)

(Comments? Email m at noelbotevera@...)