Freedomland is an ironic title for this police drama.  Literally, it refers to a New Jersey orphanage that had a dark history of its treatment of children and had been closed down.  More figuratively, it refers to the racist attitudes prevailing in New Jersey neighbourhoods where local people feel imprisoned.

The setting is 1999 and it is alarming to see such a picture of racial animosity at the end of the 20th century, forty years after the civil rights movement.  There are many intense sequences and confrontations.

This is increased when a woman who helps out at a care centre in the neighbourhood claims that she was carjacked, the perpetrator taking her four year old son in the back of the car.  She is in a state of shock (and the flashbacks visualise the attack).  When people hear that the suspect is from their projects and the police move in en masse, tensions simmer and build up to a stance between them and us, citizens versus police with batons and shields.

This racism theme is in the background all the time (aggravated by the fact that the brother of the distraught mother is a surly member of the local police).  The centre of attention is the investigation into the disappearance of the child and the consequent search.  It is presided over by Samuel L. Jackson as an experienced detective who is the champion of the neighbourhood.  He also has problems with his own life and his influence on his wild son now serving a prison sentence.

Julianne Moore plays the mother.  The screenplay by novelist Richard Price from his own book, provides a number of long speeches for the stars.  Julianne Moore in particular has many emotional scenes and is powerful in her ability to create an atmosphere.

Price based his police officer on a detective who had helped him in his research for Spike Lee’s Clockers during the 1990s.  He had also discovered an abandoned orphanage on Staten Island which led him to the idea of Freedomland.  He also came across a group of parents who assisted in the recovery of abducted children, offering the frightening statistic that in a large majority of the cases it was a parent who had taken or killed the child.  The Sopranos Edie Falco plays the head of such a group.

This means that Freedomland is not an easy film at all.  It is deadly serious in its quite wide ranging social themes rather than just simply a large scale version of a TV episode.

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