When you make it your business to see practically every film that hits the big screen, inevitably you end up all alone in theaters far too often. In my eleventh-hour search to lasso some company for Monday night’s screening of Freedomland, a neighbor of mine, having seen the commercials, responded, “No thanks, I don’t like scary movies.”

Having seen Freedomland, I can safely say calling this flick a “scary movie” is as far off the mark as classifying golf as “exciting” or referring to Paul Walker as an “actor.”

Studios often craft trailers and commercials that completely misrepresent their films in an effort to make the product more delectable to the movie-going public – hardly a problem for the common man until you buy a ticket for The Pianist expecting to see Wolfenstein 3D.

Given the television ads, I can’t blame anyone for expecting a fright fest rather than what Freedomland really is – a surprisingly effective, though overly ambitious, mystery-thriller.

The film opens to a glimpse of Detective Lorenzo Council (Samuel L. Jackson), an upright cop who keeps watch over a black project with equal parts compassion and tough love. Though this part of town is by no means serene, whatever tenuous harmony that exists is shattered when a white woman, Brenda Martin (Julianne Moore), shows up bloody at a hospital claiming she had been violently carjacked nearby. Worse yet, the 5-foot-10-inch, 150-pound black male she claims boosted her ride also made off with her son, who was asleep in the back seat.

The underprivileged residents are then unjustly barricaded in their rundown neighborhood by overzealous cops in search of the criminal – all this at the behest of Brenda’s brother, Danny (Ron Eldard, House of Sand and Fog), a bullheaded officer whose beat is the nearby whitebread suburb, Gannon.

A group of parents led by bereaved mother Karen Collucci (Edie Falco, HBO’s The Sopranos) offers a sleepless Detective Council aid in finding the boy. Their search party takes them to Freedomland, which is not the George W. Bush sponsored amusement park you might have pictured. Rather, the title location is a hellish institution for troubled children, or was, until it was shut down in the ’50s.

Though the commercials mainly focus on this creepy locale, the film only visits there for a little more than 10 minutes. They are 10 rather eventful minutes (Collucci attempting to coax a confession from Brenda is particularly intense), but the title is surely more of a play on the movie’s racial conflicts than this mostly insignificant, abandoned compound.

Freedomland asks more from Jackson than, say, 2005’s The Man (a film that got snubbed even from the Razzie awards). The detective has a certain vulnerability. For the first time, I found myself thinking the good guys might need two or three Jacksons to win out. For a while, one just wasn’t cutting the mustard. The epitome with Hollywood cool does come through with a vintage Samuel L. line: “You can tell the prosecutor he can kiss my black ass, and when he’s done you can get some too.” Classic!

Meanwhile, it’s difficult to identify with Brenda and sometimes uncomfortable to watch her on screen, though this is no failing of Moore’s. The woman is a loony toon; she’s not supposed to make you feel all warm and fuzzy inside. Moore’s portrayal boasts an impressive range of emotion.

My only problem with the film, and it’s a big one, is it is inherently bipolar. It can’t seem to decide whether it wants to be a film about race relations – blacks’ justified and sometimes unjustified anger at white oppression and indifference – or a film about a mother coping with the loss of her son.

Perhaps an extremely skilled filmmaker could get away without making such a choice, but director Joe Roth, whose previous work includes Christmas With the Kranks, undoubtedly would have been better served in focusing his film so it tackled only one of these issues head-on.

Still, Freedomland stands as a pretty powerful film released in a month when studios tend to dump their garbage into the local multiplex. It may not be the feel-good date movie couples with a Valentine’s Day hangover can snuggle up and watch, but given what else is out there in February (i.e. Big Momma’s House 2), Freedomland may be well worth a visit.

The Verdict

Movie: Freedomland

Starring: Samuel L. Jackson, Julianne Moore

Verdict: Jackson and Moore perform valiantly, but the film’s lack of focus becomes distracting.

B

Contact reporter Patrick Gavin at gavindbk@gmail.com.