Freeheld (2015)

Freeheld (2015) is a film of unassailable moral hygiene and almost no dramatic pulse. Peter Sollett directs Ron Nyswaner's screenplay, which adapts Cynthia Wade's Oscar-winning documentary short about Laurel Hester, an Ocean County detective who spent her last months petitioning a board of chosen freeholders for the right to leave her pension to the woman she loved. Julianne Moore plays Hester with a clenched jaw and a dying-woman pallor. Elliot Page plays Stacie Andree, the car mechanic she marries in a New Jersey that refuses to recognize the marriage. The subject is real, the injustice is real, and the film approaches both the way a museum approaches a diorama. Respectfully. From a distance.

What the picture offers in social consciousness it withholds in texture. The same-sex relationship sits at the center of the frame, which in 2015 was still a modest commercial gamble, and the supporting cast includes a closeted gay colleague whose fear is sketched in a few unhappy scenes and a Garden State Equality activist, played by Steve Carell at a volume that suggests he wandered in from a different, louder movie. There is a feminist spine here, a woman insisting that a male-dominated police force and a male-dominated county board treat her family as a family, though the film never bothers to name it as such. It simply lets her be right and lets everyone else be wrong.

The trouble is the delivery. Freeheld is a message drama that knows its message before the opening credits and learns nothing new on the way to the closing ones. Critics called it by-the-numbers, and they were being generous with the numbers. Speeches are made. A courtroom-style appeal lands. The audience is instructed, gently and at length, on a matter most of it settled years earlier. It is a decent film about a decent fight, and decency, alas, is not the same thing as cinema.