225BatonRouge.com - Blogs

"Did you ever feel like the world is a black tuxedo and you're a pair of brown shoes?" quipped the late but fantastic George Gobel to Johnny Carson.

Julianne Moore's character in this movie typifies this quote. Her life has been one lost battle after another, after another, and another.....you get the message.

This movie features Samuel L. Jackson and if you're a Jackson fan you won't be too disappointed, but don't kid yourself this ain't "A Time To Kill," "The Negotiator" or "Changing Lanes". However, it may be the best SLJ movie you're going to see for a while, even considering he has two very exciting sounding movies coming out this year. One, "Black Snake Moan," is about a white nymphomaniac who needs to be cured by a black blues man! What's to cure? And, the lovely sounding "Snakes on a Plane" about, yeap, snakes let loose on a plane as a way of assassinating a dude. I guess they need a black man to resolve this also.

Edie Falco also stars in Freedomland and only Falco fans will know it's her. She's convincing as Karen Colucci, the parent of a child who was apparently kidnapped and subsequently murdered. And now she follows other "missing child cases" with the intensity of a M.A.D.D. alumnus.Brenda Martin, played by Moore, has a mental and self net worth of zero! She weighs her worth against her ability to stay involved within a romantic relationship. She's struggled in and out of these romantic trysts with no luck ever! She's battled a costly war with drug addiction and for those reasons has been ostracized by her family. Or maybe she's ostracized herself because of the guilt associated with constant failure.When the movie starts, she claims to have been drug free for two years, has a son and works as a volunteer in a low-income housing project. She arrives at the emergency room with bloody and shredded hands from being thrown to the ground by a carjacker. She's mentally incapacitated, of course, and we understand that when we find out her son was asleep on the back seat of the car. What we don't know is that her hand wounds, which are self-inflicted, could be a metaphor for the mental wounds she's been inflicting on herself for an entire life.

For some reason she's made an unconscious decision to compare her life to the life the world expects her to lead. When she fails, she inflicts more mental wounds, incrementally reducing her worth to nothing.

That is until she gives birth to her son.The birth of her son is in a way her rebirth! Life has meaning since the overwhelming miracle and now struggle for approval is over. The drugs have faded away to a faint memory and the need for men is over.Wrong!Brenda Martin fails to understand the world and its condemnations do not matter.

Without the constant, self-destructive reminders to her that being man-less isn't being a failure, she'd be just like the rest of us. We all fail at this. Drugs will take their own toll on our bodies, we don't need to further abuse ourselves over poor personal choices, but she does. And while our children can, and should be expected to contribute to society, having them won't right all of our wrongs.

Actually, the world is the brown pair of shoes and we're the soles, being worn out and replaced as time moves on. Brenda Martin never figures this out and is condemned for life.