Freeheld

The Oscar-winning Freeheld is being broadcast on Cinemax during Gay Pride Month (next viewing June 25, 6:45pm). It tells a bittersweet story: Detective Lieutenant Laurel Hester is dying of cancer and, after 25 years as an Ocean County, New Jersey cop, asks that her pension be transferred to her domestic partner Stacie Andree. The County Commissioners, known by the arcane name of Chosen Freeholders, are a group of five assumedly hetero white men in suits (and, apparently, all Republicans) who continue to refuse her request, despite growing community support.

As her health deteriorates, the local movement intensifies its pressure on the Freeholders to award County pensions to same-sex partners, a decision about which supporters chant to the recalcitrant and stodgy Freeholders, "It's in your power. It's in your power." One Freeholder is honest about his motivation: he believes marriage is exclusively a boy/girl kinda thing. The others dither between financial and bureaucratic reasons. Meanwhile, other New Jersey counties learn from this grassroots movement and change their regulations to include domestic partners.

Republican senior police officers, Hester's long-time partner and other locals who never thought about gay rights in their life rally, first around these two devoted women and then around the issue and against the injustice. It is a race for time - and this is one place the film lets us down. Without dates and a timeframe, we are lacking an important context, both personally and politically.

In the end, a call from Governor Corzine to the Director of the Freeholders precedes a very public change of mind in the presence of Laurel Hester, quite visibly on the edge of death. One is left to wonder why the Governor made the call and what ultimately forced the Freeholders to change their dreadful position.

Besides the 2008 Oscar for Best Documentary Short Subject, this film, directed by Cynthia Wade ("Shelter Dogs" and "Grist for the Mill"), won over a dozen other awards, including the Sundance Film Festival 2007 Special Jury Prize.

This is a compelling, sometimes devastating documentary, but the focus is very narrow - on this particular couple facing their tragic situation. The film lacks a somewhat wider view of the struggle for equality. Plus, there is no sign of other lesbians or other supportive friends in their personal lives - just very committed colleagues and neighbors at the meetings. We see this loving couple in their home, but they seem always to be there alone.

Watching the desperate Laurel Hester and Stacie Andree expend Hester's last months hitting their heads against this wall of "suits" is painful to anyone who has been unable to change injustice, no matter how clear and righteous the cause. Their profound exhaustion at the emergency meeting to announce the Freeholders' revised decision is bittersweet. Hester lived just a few weeks more.