Labor Day (adapted
from the best-selling novel by Joyce Maynard), is a romantic drama featuring
Kate Winslet as a single mother who is out food shopping when an escaped
convict (Josh Brolin) forces her and her son Henry (Gattlin Griffith) to become
hostages in their own home until he is ready to go on the run. Told to the
audience from the perspective of an older Henry (Tobey Maguire), the film
explores how the outcast Frank and Adele (Winslet) begin to form a strange and
intimate relationship as the story unfolds.
In the press book for the film, it describes it as ‘a
poignant and heart-warming movie’ and uses phrases such as ‘mid-life
renaissance’ and ‘the ties that bind’, cliché phrases that one invokes at their
peril. We’ve gotten so used to these kinds of phrases being thrown around any
old ‘romance’ film that it’s hard not to raise a cynical eyebrow when going in…and
unfortunately for Labor Day, the
scepticism is well founded. The film just can’t decide what it wants to be, on
the one hand attempting to tackle a melodrama whilst precariously balancing a
rather forced coming-of-age story in the other.
The first thirty minutes of the film – which includes most
of the footage shown in the trailer – details Adele and Henry meeting Frank,
who subsequently holds them under house arrest, then proceeds to (in a very
Nicholas Sparks-ian way) start doing odd jobs around the house, teaching the
young boy how to play baseball and (I’m not making this up, watch the trailer)
helps mother and son make a pie in an almost vomit-inducingly saccharine way.
The entire film – save for flashbacks – all seems to take place in late
afternoon, the characters and locations constantly bathed in the sort of golden
light you’d normally see in a Ferrero Rocher advert, and it’s all under laid
with an irritating, ‘ooh look how soft and sweet this is’ musical score and
selection of songs.
Performance-wise, Josh Brolin handles the role given to him
very well, whilst Winslet just kept reminding me how good she was in Revolutionary Road, a much darker film
which gave her a lot more room to breathe in her role as a tortured single
mother. Despite his very little screen time, Tobey Maguire gives the most
believable performance, whilst Griffith appears to spend most of the film
simply staring unblinkingly at everyone and everything with his mouth hung
open. Perhaps the most enjoyable character comes from Clark Gregg as Adele’s
ex-husband, his scenes actually injecting some light-hearted humour into the
drab of everything else around him.
The problem that underlies everything else is that the film
just can’t decide on a tone, the pie-making scene clumsily juxtaposed with the
realisation that Frank is still a dangerous criminal and that if I was Adele, I
would have called the police about fifty times by now, the suspension of
disbelief rapidly becoming suspension of common sense. The all-too-brief scenes
of real darkness much later in the film are badly misjudged and clash horribly
with the sugary-sweet romantic elements established earlier on and is not
helped by the (admittedly handsome) cinematography that bathes everything in
over-exposed light.
Having never read the source material, I can’t comment on
whether Labor Day is an effective
adaptation or not, but purely as a film it just doesn’t hold together, the few
good performances and enticing cinematography providing little foundation for
the mishandled tone and saccharine atmosphere.
2 Stars
2 Stars
