Freeheld is the true love story of Laurel Hester and Stacie Andree, a lesbian police detective and her domestic partner, and their fight for justice to secure Hester's pension benefits when she is diagnosed with terminal cancer.
[Freeheld] is sincere, to be sure, but unlikely to win any prizes. For starters, the most memorable character in this important story of a courageous woman is a man; that's a problem.
Freeheld is not an Oscar movie. Freeheld is an HBO-on-a-Sunday-afternoon-because-you-don't-have-anything-else-to-do movie, and as an HBO-on-a-Sunday-afternoon-because-you-don't-have-anything-else-to-do movie, it's solid.
Page and Julianne Moore, who plays Hester, have an easy if not electric chemistry, but they seem hamstrung by the movie-of-the-week tropes and Peter Sollett's plodding direction.
