Red-eyed, bloodied, and fragile, Brenda (Julianne Moore) wanders through the New Jersey Armstrong Project and arrives at a medical center, where she's surrounded by ER doctors and interviewed by Detective Lorenzo Council (Samuel L. Jackson). She describes what happened as you see it in flashback: She's carjacked and thrown to the ground by a young black man. A few minutes later, she says her four-year-old son was in the backseat. Though he swings into action, Lorenzo intuits immediately that she's not telling the entire truth. As Brenda is haunted, then, so is the culture -- by ghosts of lost children, legacies of abuse and distrust, a looming history of racism. Brenda is burdened at last with speaking some version of "truth." Using language elegiac and perfect and quite unlike her own, she confesses her great sin and the film's great lacuna, a desire for which she pays an impossible price.

Earnest and overbearing, FREEDOMLAND features mature themes and imagery: It's not for kids. Inspired by the 1994 case in which Susan Smith drowned her two young sons in South Carolina and claimed she had been carjacked by "a black man," the film, based on Richard Price's 1998 novel, attempts to give voice to a Smithlike character as well as some black residents of a New Jersey housing project who are enraged by the white mother's accusation and the assumption by police and journalists alike that her holey story makes sense.