MOVIE REVIEW
“Freeheld”
Grade: B
Starring Julianne Moore, Ellen Page and Steve Carell. Directed by Peter Sollett.
Rated PG-13 for some thematic elements, language and sexuality. Check listings for theaters. 1 hour, 43 minutes.
Bottom line: A film about equality, plain and simple
It’s starting to feel like a trend. With “Freeheld,” as with “Still Alice” before it, Julianne Moore gives a performance as a seriously ill individual that is stronger and more effective than the film that contains it.
Unlike its predecessor, which was only about a disease, “Freeheld” comes freighted with Hollywood social consciousness. The based-on-fact story of a dying New Jersey police detective who in 2005 fights to leave her pension to her domestic partner, “Freeheld” is a politically correct romantic weepy that plays in 2015 like a self-congratulatory victory lap for gay rights in general and same-sex marriage in particular.
As directed by Peter Sollett and scripted by Ron Nyswaner, who wrote the similarly earnest “Philadelphia” more than 20 years ago, “Freeheld” begins with a romance so sweet and so square it could have sprung from a same-sex Nicholas Sparks novel.
Met first is Laurel Hester, convincingly played by Moore as one tough, wised-up New Jersey state police detective, 23 years on the force.
Because she wants to be the first woman on the Ocean County force to be made a lieutenant, Hester has kept her sexuality a secret from everyone, even her equally hard-nosed police partner, Dane Wells (a quietly effective Michael Shannon).
All that starts to change at an all-female volleyball game where Hester catches the eye of Stacie Andree (Ellen Page).
Before you know it, the two women have bought a house together and Hester and Andree register as a couple under New Jersey’s Domestic Partnership Act, and then, as happens in the movies as well as in life, Hester goes to the doctor because she thinks she’s pulled a muscle and returns with a diagnosis of stage 4 cancer.
Because Andree won’t be able to afford their house without it, Hester wants her police pension to go to her, a request that even partner Wells doesn’t get at first, blurting out, “That’s for married people.”
A similar reaction dominates the Ocean County Board of Chosen Freeholders (hence the title “Freeheld”), the governmental body with authority over Hester’s pension, which rejects her petition because of “the sanctity of marriage.”
It is one of the strengths of Moore’s performance that she conveys Hester’s insistence that this is not about marriage, or any kind of special treatment. It’s about equality, plain and simple.
Yet it speaks to what is lacking in “Freeheld” that its most emotional section is that of the photographs at the close of Laurel Hester and Stacie Andree. Those pictures remind us that these events happened to real people, something the standard nature of so much of “Freeheld” makes it easy to forget.
