Freedomland has its heart in the right place, but it has trouble expressing itself, stumbling about trying to cover several bases. It's a tapestry of clashing colors, where the parts don't align with one another -- part cop drama, part race drama, part women-who-need-healing drama, all over the place. By the time the film is over, everything and nothing has been said.

The story and characters Freedomland sets up are ambitious by design, but also unwieldy. Taking place in a poor developmental area in New Jersey, it begins with Brenda Martin (Julianna Moore) wandering shellshocked into a hospital. She eventually tells detective Lorenzo Council (Samuel L. Jackson) that she was carjacked, with her 4-year-old son inside the vehicle, by a black man. Before Lorenzo can make a move, Brenda's brother Danny (Ron Eldard), also a detective but of the neighboring town, jumps the gun and organizes a police blockade that cordons off the Armstrong housing projects, trapping its black residents within.

The movie then bounds around the several threads here, whipping up hysteria along the way, although not to much effect. The police blockade creates an instantaneous riot potential situation, with the officers in riot gear on one side and an angry mob on the other, upset that such drastic measures are taken to locate and rescue one white child. Lorenzo wants to work quickly to keep things from getting uglier, but Brenda, who isn't telling the whole story, is largely uncooperative, becoming the kind of frustrating character who basically pulls the plot along by slowly revealing information unknown to everyone else. Meanwhile, Edie Falco shows up as Karen, the leader of a group of mothers who take it upon themselves to search for missing children.

Everything feels overwrought -- the mob vs. police, Brenda's melodramatically wounded woman, her bug-eyed hot-tempered brother -- all there to create an effect for the sake of effect, with little going on behind it. The movie wishes to communicate anxiety, but because the events lack a deeper dimension and fall back on recycled imagery (from the mob scenes) and character types (not only Brenda and her brother but also the residents of Armstrong and the policemen) the only sensation it creates is bemused numbness. The visual tactics even seem desperate in certain parts -- the early scene when Brenda says "My son was in the car!" leads to a weird part where Lorenzo hyperventilates as he tries to get more information from her, whirling back and forth, whipping out his inhaler, and shoving out people who try to come into the room.

Moore seems to be particularly victimized by this drum-up strategy. She's an actress of great skill and I consider myself one of her admirers, but in Freedomland she gives the worst performance I've seen from her. I hate saying that, but I'm also not sure if the character could've been saved -- Brenda is the person on whom the plot hinges, but she operates with histrionics (speaking of recycled character types, the histrionic woman is one I always hope will be put to rest). Worse yet, she takes the major part in a late scene that brings the movie to a dead halt. It's a scene in which a speech seems to take forever and reveals a whole story going on behind the story we've been seeing, one which we haven't been clued into at all during all the scenes of angry residents, police procedures, and the operations of the search-and-rescue team.

That rescue mission, led by Falco's character, is given some kind of conspicuously singled-out relevance as heroic music swells up during their initial foray into an abandoned park. At that point, Freedomland seems to say this is where its true center lies -- this thread about pain and healing, and the good efforts of good people -- and one of the ending scenes appears to reiterate this. While serving to show how decent its intentions were, it also highlights the awkwardness of the whole vehicle, juxtaposing these rather disparate scenarios -- racial tension-driven anger and the mending of personal wounds -- in a surface-glossing manner, more a display than an exploration.

As much as his character tries to hold the community together, Jackson, with his levelheaded and reined-in performance, tries his best to hold the whole movie together, giving it at least one reliable emotional anchor. However, by the home stretch the viewers might feel as weary as the put-upon Lorenzo, who subscribes to a philosophy of inevitability, waiting for the events to play out to their conclusion and be done with it.

(Released by Sony Pictures and rated "R" for language and some violent content.)