Monthly Archives: March 2016

  • Labor Day

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Jason Reitman (2013)

    One of the few good bits in Todd Field’s Little Children (2006) occurs early on, when Sarah Pierce, played by Kate Winslet, sits in a park with her child, along with two other young mothers and their children, and locks eyes with Brad (Patrick Wilson).  It’s a requirement of the often unconvincing plot that Sarah launches immediately into a torrid affair with Brad but Kate Winslet makes you believe in that moment her character’s desperate avidity, that Sarah is ready to give anything different a go.   Labor Day may be Winslet’s worst movie since Little Children.  Like the earlier one, it’s based on a well-regarded novel but has a ludicrous storyline.  (There’s no reason to think that Jason Reitman’s screenplay, rather than the book’s author Joyce Maynard, is responsible for this.)  And, as with Little Children, the only thing worth sitting through Labor Day for are moments in Kate Winslet’s performance – even though, for the most part, she can’t make you suspend disbelief in the situation of the woman she’s playing.   That woman is Adele Wheeler, a depressed thirty-something living in rural New Hampshire.  Adele’s marriage has ended and she shares the house with her only child, thirteen-year-old Henry (Gattlin Griffith).  It’s quite late in the film that we learn Adele had several miscarriages and a stillborn baby girl before her husband left her:  we know relatively soon that she’s become increasingly depressed and turned in on herself to the point of agoraphobia.  On the eve of Labor Day weekend, Henry persuades his mother to go on a rare outing to a supermarket.  It’s while they’re shopping there that a man (Josh Brolin) confronts them.  He insists on being given a lift and coming home with Adele and Henry.  His name is Frank Chambers and, as the local television news broadcasts soon make clear to them, he’s an escaped criminal who was serving eighteen years for murder.

    The main action of Labor Day begins on a Thursday and ends the following Tuesday.  When Frank first takes occupation of Adele’s house he ties her hands but, by Friday morning, she’s free to move about the place as she pleases.  Kate Winslet holds your attention in these scenes.  She makes Adele’s responses to Frank primarily sexual from an early stage and this, in the circumstances, is striking.  Adele’s need for a man in her life is projected onto the one hiding out in her home; it doesn’t seem to matter to her that he’s a killer.  Frank assures her and Henry that the crime that landed him in jail ‘wasn’t like you think’ but how can they know to believe him?   Adele, as far as the viewer can see, never tries to find out more:  the nature of the death that Frank caused is revealed purely through flashbacks which seem to be occurring in his own head.  The sole interest of Labor Day is the possibility that Adele, as played by Winslet, doesn’t mind what Frank has done:  she loves and cares for her son but she wants and needs the man on the run at least as much.  The fundamental disappointment of the material is its sentimentality – its refusal to grapple with the challenging idea that Adele’s desire for Frank is unaffected by his criminality and his potential threat to her and Henry.   It turns out Frank is as good as his word:  as a young man (played by Tom Lipinski), he didn’t mean to kill his unfaithful trampy wife (Maika Monroe), despicable as she’s shown to be.  He grabbed hold of her and she fell and hit her head on a radiator and died.  He is as innocent as Billy Budd (and the wife is made to seem just about as malignant as Master-at-Arms Claggart).  Frank is an absolute gent:  when the police eventually arrive at the house to apprehend him, he once more ties Adele’s hands, and this time Henry’s too, to make it seem they weren’t harbouring him willingly.

    Over the long weekend (Labor Day moves very slowly), Frank proves himself a domestic god, inside and outside the house.   He tidies, irons, cooks, waxes the floor, cleans the gutters, repairs Adele’s car.  He teaches Henry, who ‘sucks’ at baseball, how to play the game and, as usual in this kind of routine, the boy absorbs his lesson instantly.  (Frank shows not a trace of anxiety about the risk of being seen playing games outdoors.)  In return, Adele, who loves dancing (under her own roof), shows Frank some steps.  By the Saturday, the pair are sleeping together.  By the Sunday morning, they’re planning to start a new life in Canada.  On the evidence of this movie, public services over Labor Day weekend are full of surprises, or were in 1987, when most of the action takes place:  there’s mention of only a few trains running yet the smalltown library is open on Sunday – that’s when Adele asks Henry to go there and get a book out about British Columbia.  The plotting of Labor Day has gone bonkers by this stage.  Holiday Monday itself is spent packing up for a house move; early next morning Adele and Frank are loading up her car in plain sight from the street.  (True it’s not a busy street but two of Adele’s neighbours have already called at the house since Thursday.)  I understood the trio had to drive to the Canadian border together – avoiding police suspicion by being a family – but why couldn’t Adele and Henry return home after delivering Frank to safety and join him later?

    Labor Day has brought to an end Jason Reitman’s run of largely successful movies.  In spite of his talent for satirical, even dark comedy, I wonder if he’s too good natured for a piece like this.   Eric Steelberg’s lighting of the mostly gloomy interiors of the house is expressive so it’s all the more pity that the tone of the film is bland.  Reitman is too anxious too soon to assure the audience that the picture is going to be heart-warming:  Rolfe Kent supplies a standard-issue, twinkly-hopeful score as soon as Frank starts making himself at home and ominous music only when the family’s attempts to emigrate are under threat.  The performances are mostly disappointing too.  As Frank, Josh Brolin doesn’t seem dangerous even before Reitman prematurely dispels any worries that he might be.  Gattlin Griffith tries hard but is monotonously sensitive as Henry.  It’s hard to credit that Adele, however hard up she may have been, was ever married to the unprepossessing and pompous twit who is Henry’s father (Clarke Gregg).

    The story is narrated by the adult Henry.   After Frank has returned to prison (with many years added to his sentence), the young teenage Henry briefly becomes an older one (Dylan Minnette).  Then, as the decades whoosh by, he turns into Tobey Maguire (who has presumably supplied the voiceover, with its familiar retrospective tone, throughout).  Grown-up Henry runs a successful bakery – speciality peach pie, just like the one Frank Chambers made on Labor Day weekend 1987 (although Frank was so multi-skilled that Henry could just as easily have been inspired to become a shit-hot car mechanic or a baseball star).  Still behind bars but now about to be released, Frank reads about the bakery in a magazine.  That’s how he renews contact with Henry and, through him, his mother.  A happy ending is achieved, as Frank and Adele are reunited and walk hand in hand through meadows green into a perfect future.  By the end of Labor Day, I was reduced to finding trivial coincident resonances with other Kate Winslet movies.  She was April Wheeler in Revolutionary Road; she’s Adele Wheeler here.  (The male lead is called Frank in both films.)   She enjoys perfectly-baked peach pie on this occasion, after throwing up a dodgy apple and pear cobbler in Carnage.

    1 April 2014

  • La guerre est finie

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Alain Resnais (1966)

    The title is ironic.  The protagonist Diego (Yves Montand) is a stalwart of the communist party, commuting between France and Spain to work for the overthrow of the Franco regime, more than a quarter of a century after the end of the Spanish Civil War.  Diego reflects on his motives for continuing with a project so dangerous and, in terms of bringing about political change in Spain, still fruitless.  His recognition of that and his realisation that the appeal of this way of life is largely nostalgic do nothing to weaken its hold on him.  The false names and passports that Diego uses in his line of work have the effect of reinforcing the finally unyielding core of his identity.  Since Alain Resnais’s film was made a decade before Franco’s death and Spain’s subsequent transition to democracy, the material had an intrinsic urgency and poignancy that can’t easily be reproduced for an audience coming to it over thirty years later.  Those qualities certainly don’t emerge from the film as a piece of cinema tout court.   La guerre est finie is often absorbing but thanks more to its meticulous composition (the movement of Sacha Vierny’s camera, the editing by Eric Pluet and Ziva Mostec) than to the themes and the characters which Resnais, working from a screenplay by Jorge Semprún, presents.  What’s on the screen and the soundtrack are parallel experiences:  there’s a disjunction between the fluid images and the spoken word, especially Diego’s mainly explicative voiceover.  (The mixture of dubbing and subtitling – the film is mostly in French with a few exchanges in Spanish – may have contributed to the stiffness of the dialogue and narration.)   The luscious score by Giovanni Fusco, with its obvious Hispanic details, doesn’t seem to fit with what we see and the rest of what we hear.  The music has a trivialising effect.

    The progress of the story is occasionally interrupted by what I took to be a mixture of flashbacks and Diego’s anticipation of what lies in store for him (and sometimes the collision of these two mental processes).  Overall, though, the narrative is linear, more so than in other Resnais films made around the same time.  I still found the film fairly hard to follow – or perhaps hard to engage with enough to want to follow.  Although Diego’s weary nobility becomes tedious, Yves Montand has authority and credibility.  His acting looks very simple so that it rarely seems like acting.  He conveys a strong and continuing sense of a self-questioning mind at work.  The two main female characters are Diego’s mistress of several years, Marianne, and Nadine, a young girl whose father’s identity he borrows at one point.  Ingrid Thulin makes Marianne’s attachment to Diego affecting in a physically convincing way, although a few of her reactions come across as over-prepared.  As Nadine, Geneviève Bujold is perhaps too aware of the camera and occasionally overdoes gamine inscrutability but she’s a vivid, striking presence.  The characters of the women are neatly designed to reflect Diego’s conflicting feelings:  Marianne belongs to his longstanding way of life and incarnates the doomed loyalty which that way of life connotes; Nadine, with whom he sleeps only once, reflects the tension between Diego’s yearning for the ardent self-confidence and political enthusiasms of youth and his dislike (maybe envy) of new forms of revolutionary activism.  Yet the conception of all main three characters is so finished that the actors, good as they are, find it hard to bring them fully to life.  Michel Piccoli, as usual, comes through strongly – in a brief appearance as a customs officer, one of the many document-checkers we meet in the course of La guerre est finie.

    29 June 2009

     

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