Our good friends R & E bought this on DVD and loaned it to us. We like the two main actors, and here they do fine jobs. But the story is a bit disjointed and very slow in spots to the point that I glanced quite often at the DVD clock to see how much time is left. For me that is not a good sign.
Samuel L. Jackson is Lorenzo Council, a New Jersey detective who works mainly in a low-rent housing development almost exclusively black. He is at the clinic when a lady comes in with bloody hands and almost in a trance. It is Julianne Moore as Brenda Martin, and she tells him that a black man took her car, pushed her in gravel where she cut her hands. He decides to get to the bottom of all this but her story doesn't quite seem to add up.
Most of the movie involves two intertwined themes. The detective trying to figure out exactly what happened, and the white cops coming down hard on the black community, trying to force them to "give up" the guilty person, basically acting as judge and jury even before the story was corroborated.
SPOILERS. As she is questioned, she eventually breaks down and says her 4 year old son was asleep in the car. So they search for a boy. They go to a long abandoned complex called "Freedomland" where juveniles had been kept years ago. Finally she admits he is not there, and in a complex and very slow explanation she explains that when she left him alone he drank too much cough syrup and died, so she buried him in a shallow grave. She gets charged, serves some time, who knows what will happen. Not really my kind of movie.
Samuel L. Jackson is Lorenzo Council, a New Jersey detective who works mainly in a low-rent housing development almost exclusively black. He is at the clinic when a lady comes in with bloody hands and almost in a trance. It is Julianne Moore as Brenda Martin, and she tells him that a black man took her car, pushed her in gravel where she cut her hands. He decides to get to the bottom of all this but her story doesn't quite seem to add up.
Most of the movie involves two intertwined themes. The detective trying to figure out exactly what happened, and the white cops coming down hard on the black community, trying to force them to "give up" the guilty person, basically acting as judge and jury even before the story was corroborated.
SPOILERS. As she is questioned, she eventually breaks down and says her 4 year old son was asleep in the car. So they search for a boy. They go to a long abandoned complex called "Freedomland" where juveniles had been kept years ago. Finally she admits he is not there, and in a complex and very slow explanation she explains that when she left him alone he drank too much cough syrup and died, so she buried him in a shallow grave. She gets charged, serves some time, who knows what will happen. Not really my kind of movie.