Film reviews: Freeheld with Julianne Moore; Now Add Honey

If you liked Julianne Moore in Still Alice, you’ll be impressed with her latest effort.

Julianne Moore and Ellen Page are convincing as two women who love each other in Freeheld.

‘It does suck, but it is how it is, right?” So says New Jersey detective Laurel Hester (Julianne Moore) to her partner — in life, not crime-fighting — Stacie Andree (Ellen Page), explaining why she can’t accompany her to a party in honour of the police chief. It’s hard enough for ­female detectives to be entrusted with the good cases, to win promotion, “but a gay woman, forget it’’.

The message of Freeheld, directed by Peter Sollett (Raising Victor Vargas), is that when something sucks, it’s not OK, it has to change. That’s easy to say, hard to do, and that tension can make for powerful filmmaking, from Mr Smith Goes to Washington to Rabbit-Proof Fence. Freeheld is a timely addition, given the ­intensity of the gay marriage debate, including in Australia.

Sollett’s film is based on Cynthia Wade’s Academy Award-winning 2007 documentary of the same name. Robert Zemeckis’s new film The Walk, about twin towers daredevil Philippe Petit, is also based on an Oscar-winning documentary, a coincidence that makes me wonder a bit about Hollywood’s sources of inspiration.

If there is already an acclaimed, and relatively recent, documentary about your subject, what is to be gained by making a lightly fictionalised version? Freeheld ends, as such films often do, with a sequence of snapshots of the real Laurel and Stacie, a tacit admission, perhaps, that the real story is hard to beat.

Of course, one reason is that feature films have a larger audience than documentaries, so it’s a chance to broaden the reach of the story. Many people will come to Freeheld knowing little about it (and wondering about the title, which I’ll explain in a bit).

An acted film also has the potential for greater emotional pull. In the likely event the protagonists did not have a camera running at crucial moments in their story, a documentary can’t show us their highs and lows, their joy and pain, their lived human experience. Actors can do that, especially good ones, and in Moore and Page Freeheld is well served. Moore brings the sort of dignified intensity to the role that made the Alzheimer’s film Still Alice an extraordinary experience. The measured script is by Ron Nyswaner, who won an Oscar for Jonathan Demme’s AIDS-era drama Philadelphia (1993).

We first meet Laurel at a drug bust. Moore sports a hairstyle that had me racking my brains until it clicked: Cheryl Ladd in Charlie’s Angels. She’s a good cop, dedicated and tough, in line for lieutenant after 20-plus years on the job. She’s respected by her colleagues, though no one knows she is gay, not even her detective partner Dane Wells (a solid Michael Shannon).

She’s so concerned about being outed that she crosses state lines to look for dates. She hooks up with petite, pretty Stacie, who defies appearances to be a top mechanic (in an emblematic scene she challenges a cocky grease monkey to a tyre-changing contest).

There are teething problems, such as when Laurel pulls her gun on some homophobic jerks, but we move on to a year later and the couple is setting up house, large dog and wind chimes in place. Moore and Page are convincing as two women who love each other despite their differences, including the significant age gap. They are still not out, but are happy — and then Laurel is diagnosed with advanced lung cancer. This takes us to the heart of the story, similar terrain to Philadelphia: terminal illness and endless legal battles.

Gay marriage is illegal in New Jersey in 2005, when the film is set, but domestic partnerships are permitted and Laurel and Stacie have their certificate. But when Laurel wants Stacie to receive her police pension on her death, she is told that although this is allowed under state law, it’s not under county law, and she is a county employee. The county, however, has the power to allow state law to override county law, and so it is that Laurel and Stacie and an increasing band of supporters, led by gay rights activist Steven Goldstein (an enthusiastic Steve Carrell) find themselves petitioning the local legislature, the Ocean County Board of Chosen Freeholders. The name derives from a founding stipulation that members owned property.

The members of the five-man (yes, all men) board are not bad people (as if to reinforce this, one is Tom McGowan, station manager Kenny from Frasier) but are wary of setting a precedent, of taking “a step closer to gay marriage”, as one puts it.

And so we follow Laurel’s grinding battle with aggressive cancer and timid government, with only Carrell’s Steven — “That’s Steven with a V, as in very gay” … “I’d marry you [Laurel] but I wouldn’t know what to do with your vagina’’ — offering comic respite.

If anything, Freeheld suffers from a lack of dramatic momentum, perhaps due to over-faithfulness to the real story. The flip side of this is there no attempt to manipulate our emotions. Like Laurel’s macho cop colleagues, or Stacie’s car shop boss, we will come in our own time to see the two women for who they are — good people in a terrible situation — and be reminded that it is countless little battles such as theirs that decide whether wars are won or lost.

Now Add Honey, the first feature film from Australian partners (life and creative) Wayne Hope and Robyn Butler, has a serious side, too, though it’s fairly well disguised most of the time — and that’s no crime because this is first and foremost a zany entertainment.

Hope and Butler are the creators of the television comedy series The Librarians and Upper Middle Bogan. For their big screen debut she has written the script and stars while he directs. Butler is Caroline Morgan, a commercial property lawyer with a vaguely annoying writer husband (Erik Thompson) and a couple of teenage kids. Her life isn’t particularly glamorous and she’s feeling her age.

MORE: Robyn Butler and Wayne Hope’s big idea

Her no-nonsense sister Clare (Philippa Coult­hard) is engaged to be married to Alex (radio star Hamish Blake). They are vets, a bit mad and madly in love.

The honey that is added to this slightly frothy family is niece Honey Halloway (a delightful Lucy Fry), a child star who has made it big in Hollywood as the star of a kids’ film franchise called Monkey Girl. She is home for a visit with her ambitious mother and manager Beth (Portia de Rossi, who is wonderful in a welcome local film role). Beth has irked her sisters, especially Clare, by writing a tell-all memoir about the family.

When Beth is busted for prescription drug abuse and committed to a rehab clinic, it falls to Caroline to take charge of Honey, to the alarm of her Hollywood agent. “Do you realise you are the only Australian actor not in LA?’’ he barks at her over the phone in best Ari Gold fashion.

Honey knows she’s a star but is vulnerable with it. The serious issue I mentioned is the oversexualisation of young women — Honey is being urged, including by mum, to take the next step and make a raunchy music video. Throw a sleazy local paparazzo (Angus Sampson) and a handsome celebrity chef (Robbie Magasiva) into the mix and you have all the ingredients for an enjoyable enough Australian take on the screwball comedy.

Freeheld (M)

3 stars

National release

Now Add Honey (M)

2.5 stars

National release