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
