Minor Spoils Ahead.
What confluence of factors led one of the most promising American directors of the last ten years into making a straight-faced adaptation of a bottom of the barrel airport romance novel about a love-spurned shrew who falls madly in love with the convicted murderer? I can understand the desire to make a stylish homage to contrived melodramas of the fifties, but
Labor Day is a product made without an ounce of tact, wit, or feeling. Todd Haynes or Pedro Almodovar he certainly is not. It feels as though Jason Reitman has adapted the Bob Dylan game-plan circa “Self Portrait” – to cap a series of successful artistic endeavors with a bonafide dud so that he can move on to the next stage with fire, with something to prove.
I bring up that terrible Bob Dylan album because I sense a similar self-destructive impulse at play here. If there's one quality that has connected Reitman's films until now, it has been intuition. His films never felt too belabored over and that was due to a deep understanding of a wide array of characters ranging from women mature beyond their years (
Juno) to maturity-stunted women (
Young Adult) to endearing scoundrels (a Big Tobacco lobbyist in
Thank You For Smoking, and a man that delivers dismissal notices to fired workers around the country in
Up in the Air). But there's a fundamental misunderstanding of character on every level imaginable in his latest film. For now, let's start with the casting.
Kate Winslet is cast in the role of Adele Wheeler, a shaky single mother who only leaves her home once a month due to severe depression. Immediately, this will strike any perceptive viewer as even more phony than all the obvious period signifiers (we must be in Reagan-era suburbia because of all the wood-trimmed station wagons, retro consumer products, and Coppertone ads). Winslet's gravitas as an actress has always emanated from her fierce independent spirit – a healthy mix of sexuality and intelligence. Here, other than the brief conversation she has with her son about the things they don't explain in Sex Ed, both qualities are curtailed as she is she is hammered into a role which asks her to be nothing more than to be a needy sap.
So, on one of these grocery trips, Frank Chambers, a mysterious man with blood smears on the side of his face, and a pain in his gut, approaches the mother and son in the laundry detergent aisle and forces himself into their home. It should be a hotbed for tension, but the luscious sun-kissed glow of the events that take place at their home where he holds them “hostage” dissipates all emotional and physical stakes. After he cooks them breakfast and gives Adele a PG-13 friendly one-on-one peach pie baking lesson (there was a second during this overwrought session of food porn where I felt that the pottery wheel scene
Ghost was the apex of on-screen eroticism) it is obvious Adele has the hots for they guy. Who can possibly buy for a second that a woman as attractive as Kate Winslet is so desperate for human touch that she falls for a convicted criminal and subsequently has no doubts of his character? And it's not even like he's some heartthrob that is handsome enough to push those questions far, far away from her conscience. She falls for Josh Brolin who is groomed to look like either Rob Zombie or one of his rugged, bearded roadies!
So while Frank performs as a handyman and lover par excellence, the two start making plans for a clean break to Canada. They'll start a clean future where they can try to forget events in their unfortunate past that placed them in either a psychological or physical prison (because in stories like this, it's always a foregone conclusion that he is innocent). But in a quaint little town like this where neighbors are always knocking at the front door and word of the slightest commotion travels at light-speed across town, this getaway may face some serious trials before materializing.
In most cases, I can see the potential for a good movie through despite numerous faults, but I can't see much that can be salvaged in
Labor(ious)
Day. The casting is completely off, the lensing lends all the authenticity of a Hallmark greeting card, and the screenplay – replete with unabashedly sentimental pleasantries such as “I came to save you, Adele,” and “I'd take another twenty years just to have another three days with you” – is a trash heap that should have been taken out a century ago. It is not a good sign for the year in movies when Jason Reitman's father, Ivan, whose credits include
My Super Ex-Girlfriend,
Evolution, and
Kindergarten Cop, will likely have directed the better film. Oy vey!
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Jason Reitman's Labor Day (starring Tobey Maguire, Kate Winslet & Josh Brolin)
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