**½/****
directed by Peter Sollett
by Bill Chambers Based on the Oscar-winning documentary short of the same name, Freeheld is the true story of policewoman Laurel Hester and mechanic Stacie Andree, who in the recent past, before the legalization of gay marriage, waged a public battle against Ocean County, NJ legislature when it denied the dying Hester the right to leave her pension to domestic partner Andree. Julianne Moore, enduring a protracted screen death for the second year in a row, plays Laurel beneath a cloche of Farrah Fawcett hair and Ellen Page, who produced, plays Stacie, and, um…when Back to the Future recast Marty McFly's love interest after recasting Marty McFly himself, this is the sort of aesthetic mismatch they were trying to avoid. (When we see the real Hester and Andree at the end of the picture (I know, I know), they interlock in a way that Page and Moore simply do not.) Laurel catches Stacie's eye during a volleyball game and they begin dating. Within a year, they've bought a house together, though Laurel's personal life remains a closely-guarded secret at work and it is only with some reluctance that she comes out to partner Dane (Michael Shannon). Laurel's fears of being ostracized seem justified once her diagnosis of terminal lung cancer is met with hollow sympathy by the county's Republican freeholders, who give more weight to her sexual orientation than to her years of service on the force in refusing to recognize Stacie as the lawful heir to Laurel's benefits. Soon the LGBT activist group Garden State Equality, led by the very gay, very Jewish Steven Goldstein (Steve Carell, in a likely polarizing, Michael Scott-ish turn), rallies around Laurel, and Dane defies his homophobic colleagues in doing same, because putting your life on the line for your partner is after all part of the job. The crux of the picture is that Laurel and Stacie are as authentic a couple as any heterosexual marrieds, but the bowdlerization of their relationship with that "One Year Later" intertitle–its essential distillation into two poles (meet-cute and cancer)–slams shut a pivotal window of opportunity to really demonstrate this. They're abstractions here, and consequently one gets out of the film about what one would from a broad retelling of the facts–which Freeheld kind of is, owing to Philadelphia screenwriter Ron Nyswaner's cowboys-and-Indians style of dramatization. (His portrayal of prejudice is still so quaintly direct.) A long way from the vérité sensitivity of his Raising Victor Vargas, director Peter Sollett nevertheless gives good Capra; the film is deliriously entertaining and almost, with some relief, a comedy, as it finds joy in the friction between opposites. Programme: Gala Presentations
