Peter Sollett (2015)

Hopes must have been high for Freeheld to emerge as an awards contender and, partly as a consequence, to flourish commercially.  The film seems to have so many of the right ingredients.  It’s based on actual events which led, through a public campaign, to a virtual change in the law.  It tells of a loving lesbian relationship curtailed by terminal illness.  The two main characters are played by Julianne Moore and Ellen Page.  Moore comes to Freeheld fresh from her award-winning performance in Still Alice as a woman ravaged by a different kind of incurable disease.   Page came out as gay in 2014.  She is also one of the producers of Peter Sollett’s movie, along with Cynthia Wade, who made the forty-minute film – with the same title and telling the same story – that won the Oscar for Best Documentary Short of 2007.  The supporting cast includes Michael Shannon and Steve Carell – the latter in what, on paper, sounds like a colourful character part.  But Freeheld, nearly five months after its limited release in the US, hasn’t recouped a tenth of its relatively modest $7m budget.  It hasn’t featured in the nominations for any mainstream awards.  Although it was screened at BFI prior to its UK release date (and is now available on BFI Player), the film opened in London on 19 February in only a handful of venues.  (I saw it at the Barbican Centre.)  What happened?

The title doesn’t help, for a start.  It’s apt, of course.  New Jersey police officer Laurel Hester (Moore), diagnosed with terminal lung cancer, wants to pass on her pension benefits to her domestic partner, Stacie Andree (Page):  the obstacles in her way are the members of the Ocean County NJ Board of Chosen Freeholders.   For me, the  contradiction between ‘free’ and ‘held’ is quite interesting but the two syllables together are hardly a crowd-puller.  (When the material was a documentary short, they didn’t need to be.)  The movie’s name is the least of its problems, though.  Ron Nyswaner, who wrote the screenplay, is a well-known campaigner for gay rights and an experienced scenarist (his credits include Philadelphia) but his script for Freeheld is weak.  At one point, Stacie protests that she doesn’t want the pension fight eating into the little time that she and Laurel have left together.  In terms of screen time, the fight for justice almost entirely eclipses the women’s relationship:  in the film’s second half, the ‘personal’ aspect consists of little more than a succession of changes in Julianne Moore’s make-up, as Laurel approaches death.  There’s hardly any traction or tension between the public and private sides of the story.

Even if Nyswaner’s screenplay were better, Freeheld would still have the problem of Peter Sollett’s flat-footed direction.  The five men on the board of freeholders include at least two perfectly good actors (Dennis Boutsikaris and Josh Charles) but some of the board members’ moral-slash-political exchanges are breathtakingly wooden.  Sollett’s staging of the demonstrations organised by the Steve Carell character is so lame that if you saw clips of these out of context you’d assume that Freeheld was a comedy.  Carell’s own CV is probably an added disadvantage in this respect, even though he brings a bit of zest to proceedings in his interpretation of the LGBT equal-rights advocate Steven Goldstein, the real-life founder of Garden State Equality.  It’s even harder not to laugh when the climactic board meeting – at which the freeholders give in and agree that the pension benefits may be assigned to Stacie – is attended by Laurel’s male police colleagues, who approach the meeting venue looking like a bunch of heavies.  Except, that is, for Todd Belkin (Luke Grimes), the one gay man among them.  Closeted for most of the movie, Todd leaves his associates at the police station speechless when he comes out.  They’re evidently not up to much as detectives.  Todd’s beard and grooming are a dead giveaway (again in the style of a rather broad comedy) – even before we see him in the same gay bar where Laurel and Stacie have their first date.

What finally sinks Freeheld is the miscasting of the two lead parts.   This is soon clear in Ellen Page’s case.  Stacie Andree is a car mechanic.  That doesn’t mean she should have been played by an Amazon but Ellen Page’s childlike physique and demeanour make her seem not so much androgynous as presexual and there’s very little variety in her acting.  The images of the real Laurel Hester and Stacie Andree that appear on screen at the end of the film confirm how different Page is from the butch and gutsy-looking Stacie.  Page speaks her lines in a small, whiny voice; the tragedy of Stacie’s finding a life partner whom she then loses would have much more impact, even allowing for the deficiencies of the script, if she came across as a more robust personality in the early stages.

Julianne Moore’s acting is much better than Ellen Page’s and Moore’s miscasting is much less apparent.  It was only when the photographs of the real Laurel Hester appeared that the penny dropped:  something seemed not quite right with Moore’s characterisation well before that but I couldn’t put my finger on it.  On the evidence of the photos, Laurel Hester, before her appearance was transformed by her illness and cancer treatments, wore her hair quite long and semi-permed.  She’s not conventionally pretty but the hairdo suggests that she was trying to look attractively feminine.  That’s reflected in the styling of Julianne Moore’s hair, which is flicked up at the sides, but the effect is very different because Moore has such a beautiful face.  This might not have been a problem if she’d given Laurel a rougher quality but Moore makes her too refined – she seems rather delicate from the start.  It may be her personal sensitivity and respect for Laurel Hester that have inhibited Moore’s performance here.   She was very effective as a predominantly lesbian character in The Kids Are All Right but she probably felt freer playing a fictional creation.  Of course she didn’t have to make Laurel mannish but she might have conveyed a clearer idea of how she thrived professionally in a largely male working environment.  To be fair, though, the unsatisfactoriness of Laurel in the film is much more the fault of the script than of Julianne Moore.  Still Alice, for all its weaknesses, allowed her to dramatise Alice Howland’s fight with Alzheimer’s, and she did this admirably.  She has no such opportunity in Freeheld:  Laurel is the main character but we don’t see enough of her.

The difference between Laurel and Stacie in how freely they feel able to express their sexuality was potentially one of the strongest elements of Freeheld.   This is partly a generational difference – Laurel is nearly twenty years older – and partly a reflection of their different working lives:  Laurel has to keep quiet about being gay for the sake of a career that’s very important to her.  (It’s her ambition to become the department’s first woman police lieutenant – an ambition that, according to the film, she achieved in the last days of her life.)   But the film-makers don’t explore this area in any depth.  Sollett and Nyswaner seem to have assumed that their material is so powerful they need do no more than put it on the screen:  the material is powerful but it still needs thoughtful and imaginative handling to work as drama.   The character of Dane Wells, the detective who is Laurel’s workplace partner, gives an idea of how the movie could have worked better.  According to an article in the Wall Street Journal, Dane Wells really did work in the same police force as Laurel Hester but Ron Nyswaner has used ‘dramatic licence’:  in reality, Wells left the Ocean County police years before Hester fell ill.  It’s crude and clumsy that, after a while, Wells keeps turning up in practically every scene of the film, in order to move the story forward.  Michael Shannon plays him so sympathetically, however, that you wish Nyswaner had used more licence and turned Wells into the central consciousness of Freeheld.  After all, this blunt, straight-arrow cop does undergo a conversion to thoughtful gay rights activism.  When Dale Wells addresses the board of freeholders, Michael Shannon’s integrity and skill makes Wells’s words moving.  The lines Ron Nyswaner has supplied him with are just one more dollop of moral exhortation but Shannon invests them with truth.

22 February 2016