On Movies: Julianne Moore as a dying N.J. cop seeking justice
TORONTO - "I wanted to bring Laurel back to life in the best way possible," says Julianne Moore, talking about Laurel Hester, the Ocean County, N.J., police detective the actress portrays in Freeheld.
TORONTO - "I wanted to bring Laurel back to life in the best way possible," says Julianne Moore, talking about Laurel Hester, the Ocean County, N.J., police detective the actress portrays in Freeheld.
"Laurel was always really interested in the justice system. She was a good guy, she believed in the good guys and taking care of the underdog," Moore says. "She was a very, very good police officer . . . and at this point in her life, she wanted justice for the woman that she loved."
The point in Hester's life that Moore is talking about - and that's covered with considerable fidelity in the Peter Sollett-directed feature, opening Friday at the Ritz Five and Carmike Ritz Center - is late in 2005, when the 25-year law enforcement veteran was diagnosed with lung cancer, stage 4, terminal. Hester wanted to make sure the woman she lived with, Stacie Andree, would receive Hester's pension after her death. But Ocean County officials balked. A same-sex couple? No way.
As Hester battled her cancer, she reluctantly went to battle with the freeholders, too. It was a fight that gained national attention, that was championed by gay-rights activists, that had a historic outcome. A 2007 documentary short, also called Freeheld, went on to win an Academy Award.
When Moore - who won her own Oscar this year for her portrait in Still Alice of a college professor with early-onset Alzheimer's - watched the documentary, she wept.
"It's so powerful," she says of the Cynthia Wade-directed film. "Laurel and Stacie, and Dane Wells, Laurel's detective partner, allowed Cynthia into their lives, into these very intimate moments. That's asking a lot, letting people into your life like that."
Freeheld was written by Ron Nyswaner, who was nominated for an Oscar for his screenplay for Philadelphia, the 1993 Tom Hanks AIDS drama. Ellen Page plays Andree, a garage mechanic, a generation younger than Hester. Michael Shannon is Detective Wells. He and Hester worked as a team for many years.
The real-life Andree (still a mechanic, in Brick, N.J.) and Wells (retired) were shown Freeheld in late August in a private screening room in New York. Last month, they appeared at the Toronto International Film Festival with Moore and their actor counterparts, posing for photos, taking bows.
"It got to be a little chaotic after a while, being pulled in a million different directions," Wells said on the phone recently from his home in Jackson, N.J. "All that attention was not something that any of us particularly cared for, to be honest."
But Andree and Wells were deeply moved by the film, even as they acknowledged that the experience of watching Hollywood stars reenact scenes from their lives was, well, a little weird.
"Stacie and I were concerned from day one about this story being overly dramatized, or Hollywoodized, if you will," says Wells, conference-calling with Andree. "And something that surprised us both was how accurate the screenplay and film were. With a couple of small exceptions, it was so true to life in so many details - which, of course, made it even more difficult, emotionally, to see."
Andree concurs.
"The actors and filmmakers did a wonderful job of putting everything together," she says. "But it's just like pulling off a scab - to watch all of these events all over again. It's emotional."
In the film, as in life, Andree was ready to give up the fight for the pension, to spend her last days with Hester in the peace and quiet of their Point Pleasant home. And though Hester, too, was reluctant to become part of a "cause" - Steve Carell stars as Steven Goldstein, founder of Garden State Equality, the statewide LGBT advocacy organization that led the protests against the Board of Freeholders - she wanted to be treated the way a married couple or heterosexual domestic partners would. No less, no more.
"I cared about all the energy Laurel was putting out towards everything, and I just wanted to make sure that she was OK more than anything, and to spend as much time with her as possible," says Andree. "But she wanted to make right right. This is what everybody else would get: Why isn't she able to pass down her pension to me?"
Hester died in February 2006 at age 49. Only a few weeks earlier, the Ocean County freeholders, in the glare of media scrutiny and under mounting pressure from government officials, including then-Gov. Jon Corzine, had reversed their decision and granted Andree the right to Hester's pension. The couple - Hester in a wheelchair, breathing from an oxygen tank - attended the meeting.
Moore says Edith Windsor - the lead plaintiff in United States v. Windsor, the landmark Supreme Court case in the same-sex marriage movement - has called Hester a hero "because she simply asked to be treated the way everyone else was treated. And that's right."
"And I do think this film is a reminder of how far we've come," Moore adds, "and how important it is to still talk about these issues and celebrate the fact that there has been this huge change in popular opinion."
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