Inspiring story, preachy film
Freeheld (12A) Verdict: Saved by marvellous Moore
Chronic (15A) Verdict: Roth at his best
JULIANNE MOORE, who won an Oscar for her performance in Still Alice as a linguistics professor with Alzheimer’s Disease, now plays a woman dying of lung cancer. She is due a role as a lottery winner.
But she is predictably marvellous as Laurel Hester, a New Jersey detective whose real-life decline, before her death ten years ago yesterday, became a proper cause celebre.
Hester was gay, although for years she concealed her sexuality from her police colleagues.
When she knew she was dying she asked for her pension benefits to be passed on to her partner Stacie Andree (Ellen Page, terrific), as they would be in the case of a married couple.
Again and again t he l ocal legislators, or ‘freeholders’, refused to sanction her wishes, whereupon gay rights groups then seized on the issue.
Eventually, the freeholders gave in, allowing for same-sex couples to be accorded the same pension rights as married heterosexuals, and helping to pave the way, ul t i mately, f or t he state’s legalisation of gay marriage.
The casting, not of Moore but of Page, who concealed her own sexuality before coming out as a lesbian in a speech two years ago, gives Peter Sollett’s film an added frisson.
But it is flawed, nonetheless. Writer Ron Nyswaner did a fine job with his screenplay for 1993’s Philadelphia.
Ye t despite the terrific performances of its leads, there is a naggingly preachy quality to Free- held, reinforced by Steve Carell’s jarring, semi-comic turn as a gayrights leader.
Hester’s s t ory was better represented in a 2007 documentary that shares a title with this film, and won an Academy Award.
Chronic al s o portrays t he terminally ill, this time in the company of Tim Roth’s character David, a British palliative nurse in Los Angeles whose devotion to his dying patients at first seems i mmens el y touching and admirable.
But gradually we see that in some strange psychological way he is feeding off them as much as he i s caring f or t hem, even assuming their life stories into bone tyhis own.
Mexican director Michel Franco’s English language debut, it is a quiet, somewhat morose but deeply affecting film, and Roth is absolutely superb.