Freeheld

Synopsis: New Jersey police detective, Laurel Hester (Julianne Moore), has kept her sexual orientation a secret from her partner, Dane (Michael Shannon), and the rest of her colleagues for fear that discrimination will affect her career.  However, when she meets Stacie Andree (Ellen Page)they fall in love and the secret becomes harder to keep.  A year or more later, after the two have bought and renovated a home together, Hester discovers that she has terminal cancer and finally decides to come out to the Police Department in the hope that Stacie will be granted the right to receive Hester’s pension just as a heterosexual partner would but the conservative county commissioners, known as Freeholders, refuse her request. However, when gay political activist, Steven Goldstein (Steve Carell) takes up the cause, it becomes a lightning rod for social change as they race against Hester’s worsening condition to overturn the Freeholders’ decision.

Julianne Moore has had a pretty good run of roles in the past couple years with outstanding performances in both Maps to the Stars (2014) and Still Alice (2014) and that run continues here with another finely crafted role as the tough, secretive cop who struggles to find justice and equality for her gay partner before she succumbs to lung cancer. It’s a shame, though, that her performance, along with the performances of Shannon and Page, are more effective that the film itself.

This is not the first time the story has been told. In 2007, Cynthia Wade’s 38 minute film of the same name won that year’s Oscar for Short Documentary. It’s not unlike the course that led the Oscar winning documentary The Times of Harvey Milk (1985) to the feature film version, Milk (2008) except that the result here is not as powerful.

Freeheld is really two film genres in one. For the first half it’s a same-sex love story with the looming tragedy of a terminal disease. This is the strongest and most engaging aspect of the film and Moore and Page more than hit the mark in their portrayal of the love affair. The twist is that Hester’s partner, oblivious to her orientation, has a crush on her and must deal with the confusion of emotions as he struggles to reconcile his romantic interest with her need for friendship.  Shannon’s trademark stony demeanour is perfect for this role. In the second half, though, we shift into more of a courtroom drama which, despite the appeal of Carell’s flamboyant, high-octane portrayal of the resourceful campaigner, ends up in a run-of-the-mill series of encounters between the passionate good guys and the two-dimensionally conservative bad guys as we wait for Bryan Kelder, the only sympathetic Freeholder on the panel (a very wooden performance from Josh Charles) to do the right thing and bring us to the inevitable resolution. Despite this, Freeheld still has an interesting story to tell and the central performances help us get past the film’s shortcomings.

More than two decades ago,the screenwriter of Freeheld, Ron Nyswaner, tackled similar territory in Philadelphia (1993) and it’s disappointing that the issues of equality and fair play that lie at the heart of these stories are still being pursued today. Of course, the campaign for marriage equality has been successful in the USA; a fact that is noted at the end of the film and which re-positions the story more as an acknowledgement of one of the many battles that were fought to achieve that outcome rather than a call to arms for social change, which is the role that the documentary version played.  It’s hard not to look at films like this and wonder how they’ll be viewed in years to come when, inevitably, issues of equality are more universally accepted and the need to tell these stories becomes less of an imperative.

 

 

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