For Julianne Moore, It’s Not Misery, It’s Real Life

The story unfolds as Laurel meets Stacie, they fall in love and commence living together as a gay couple. It’s during this night on the town that Stacie realizes just how spooked Laurel is about being outed.

A year later, Laurel and Stacie buy the house, get the dog and hang the wind chimes. But the harrowing trajectory feels like a variation replay of something we’ve seen from her only recently in a superior version. The Freeholders refuse Laurel’s request, citing religious and budgetary reasons.

The tone changes dramatically after Laurel’s diagnosis, though it then takes another shift when Steve Carell enters as a flamboyant gay activist who organized protests against the Freeholders’ decision.

The resulting media attention forces an ending that is admittedly moving, but the emotions seemingly come from the “it’s nearly like a movie” sequence of historical events.

Alongside Michael Shannon, Moore echoed, “It’s much easier to discriminate when you perceive someone or something as ‘other, ‘ but when you are exposed to it in a more proximate way – this is your sister, this is your neighbor, these are the people that you live with – that everyone’s just the same”. Positive intentions aside, if anyone is to take creative blame for the pictures by the numbers storyline its him. Page gives a passionate performance of a woman who simply doesn’t want to believe her partner won’t survive. “She really did a handsome job portraying that quality of Stacie’s, that gentleness and reticence and the fierceness of her love for (Laurel) as well”.

Real-life buddies and on-screen sisters Evan and Ellen at the Into the Forest premiere.

It’s set in the early 2000s and Page, who is also a producer on Freeheld, plays Hester’s partner, Stacie Andree. It doesn’t have a hint of those film’s style or energy and, boy, could it have used it. Cinematographer Maryse Alberti shot “The Wrestler” and “Velvet Goldmine”, but he’s filmed talking head documentaries that looked better than this. And for a movie that counts on heartstrings being tugged, he makes refreshingly restrained use of Hans Zimmer’s score, along with some nice Jersey-flavored guitar by Johnny Marr.

Lionsgate has released the first clip for Freeheld, director Peter Sollett’s (Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist) feature adaptation of Cynthia Wade’s 2007 Oscar-winning short of the same name. It starts with the fact that the closest they can get to marriage is a domestic partnership, in a scene that smartly captures the underwhelming nature of this proposition.