For the love of all that’s holy, someone please stop Julianne Moore from losing/abandoning any more kids.

It’s happened to her in one way or another in The Forgotten, The Hours and Boogie Nights. And here she is again in Freedomland, a movie inspired by the case of Susan Smith, the South Carolina woman who reported that her car had been “jacked” with her kids in it by a black man.

It was revealed later — after some brutal racial profiling and an arrest — that she’d killed the children herself.

That’s the suspicion that follows Brenda (Moore), an ex-drug addict who, yes, reports that a black man has hijacked her car, and that her four-year-old son was aboard.

Fueled by Brenda’s psychotic cop brother (Ron Eldard), the New Jersey projects where Brenda works as a child-care worker undergo police “lockdown,” putting an entire community under virtual house arrest. Meanwhile, a local black cop (Samuel L. Jackson) seeks the truth while suffering the pain of his peeps.

So far, so interesting. In fact, the first 20 minutes of Freedomland fooled me into thinking I might be watching a really good movie.

Part of that came from the fact that director Joe Roth lifts from a really good movie — Crash. Freedomland opens with the same audio track, silent except but for some discomfiting music, while the screen is alight with stylistically shot turmoil and visual “noise.”

But though everybody involved in Freedomland was clearly thinking “Oscar” (Moore’s oversustained one-note of sobby misery should actually preclude her from one for a year or two), they took their eye off the ball. The racial politics is the most interesting part, but it soon becomes clear that the moviemakers don’t think so. (Why is it called Freedomland? There’s a location by that name tacked on in the film. But you’d have to read the book by Richard Price to know where the name really comes from. They kept the name anyway, though. Sounds cool, I guess.)

With racial themes and a brewing race riot pushed to the background, the movie becomes all about its hackneyed “interrogating a perp” plot. Any inner turmoil felt by Jackson’s character Lorenzo Council is secondary to that moment in a Samuel L. Jackson movie when it becomes a Samuel L. Jackson movie. In this case it’s when he shouts “Kiss my black ass!” to some cracker cops, with a conviction straight out of a Dave Chappelle parody.

Council is aided in the task of “working on” Brenda by Karen Collucci, a missing-child activist played by an almost-unrecognizable Edie Falco. That this should be the movie’s overriding concern is undermined by the fact that you’re beaten over the head with the fishiness of Brenda’s story from the beginning. For the viewer, the long task of “cracking” her elicits impatience where there should be suspense.

Bottom line

The pieces of a good movie are here — inspired as it is on the case of Susan Smith, who reported her kids kidnapped by a black man, but actually murdered them herself. Too bad the movie sees race politics as a mere plot device. Moore sobs incessantly and Jackson angrily shouts things like “Kiss my black ass!” as it all descends into cop cliche.

(This film is rated 14A)
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