Freedomland, directed by Joe Roth, is a combination of Crash (2005) and The Forgotten (2004) in which racial tensions erupt while a mother is suffering from posttraumatic stress over the loss of her child. The two themes, however, are credible only up to a point. First, single mom Brenda Martin (played by Julianne Moore) is walking to a hospital while a crowd of African Americans are marching on a street to mourn someone. There is blood on her hands, so hospital authorities call the police. After detective Lorenzo Council (played by Samuel L. Jackson) arrives to find out what happened, her story is that she was carjacked by a Black man in the neighborhood of a low-income housing project, with her four-year-old son asleep in the back seat. Lorenzo tells Brenda's brother Danny (played by Ron Eldard), another detective, about her mishap, whereupon the latter uses his authority to put a cordon around the neighborhood. Soon, White police are searching door to door on suspicion that someone has the child. Lorenzo, however, is suspicious that she is lying, as he notes that two-thirds of those who report their missing children are responsible. Indeed, filmviewers will immediately share his suspicion that Brenda has done something shameful, as she is too hysterical to give any useful details except a sketch of the probable carjacker, who is a thirtysomething African American male. Meanwhile, the cordon around the project has brought Blacks to confront police, notes that no dragnet was ever attempted in the projects to catch serious lawbreakers in the last few years. In other words, the police are engaging in race discrimination, African Americans are angry, some are getting arrested, and Brenda is unimpressed when Lorenzo demonstrates that her carjacking claim has set off a timebomb that is ticking closer to an explosion in the form of a race riot. Then Karen Collucci (played by Edie Falco) arrives on the scene, representing an organization that locates lost children. She began the group when her own child was found dead after a marital quarrel. She asks Lorenzo to let her and her organization handle the search for the missing child. Although Lorenzo at first turns down the invitation, he later agrees, and the case is solved after Karen organizes a group of volunteers to comb the grounds of Freedomland, a once-grisly institution for orphans that was shut down in the 1950s. The film clearly seeks to show how police can provoke a race riot, as they did at fifteen cities in 1967 according to the Kerner Report. Although the film is based on a novel by Richard Price, Freedomland has some major plot defects. The supposedly carjacked vehicle is never pursued or found to corroborate Brenda's story; fingerprints and other clues of the alleged crime and thus not part of the strange investigation. Kidnapping is a federal crime, but the matter is handled by police in two adjacent New Jersey towns (the actual film locations are in New York City) without an explanation of the jurisdictional paradox. MH
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