With films like “Juno” and “Up in the Air”, writer/director Jason Reitman has proved to be a filmmaker who understands that every day life contains a very fine balance between comedy and tragedy. He has also shown interest in chronicling the struggles of anti-heroes (think of Charlize Theron’s Mavis in “Young Adult” or the slimy Nick played by Aaron Eckhart in “Thank You for Smoking”) who seem to spend their respective films making it almost impossible for the audience to empathize with them. It’s no coincidence that these are the films where his biggest strengths as a filmmaker come through, since audiences are always just one more second away from walking away from these damaged people.
Continuing in this path, Reitman adapted Joyce Maynard’s “Labor Day”, a story which features the same kind of dislikable characters; people whom audiences will find so disagreeable that they might want to judge the film based on their own distaste for the story being told, as opposed to Reitman’s adaptation. The film is set during Labor Day weekend in 1987 and shows the dynamic between depressed divorced mother Adele (Kate Winslet) and her 13-year-old son Henry (Gattlin Griffith). We learn through Henry’s narration that he has been trying to fulfill all of his mother’s needs since his father left her, and has proved to be successful in all fields except one.
Enter escaped convict Frank Chambers (Josh Brolin) who takes Henry and Adele hostage in their home as he plans to cross the Canadian border and avoid being sent back to prison. Seemingly out of nowhere, Adele falls madly in love with Frank, who isn’t the cruel murderer he’s accused of being but a sensitive man who makes a killer peach cobbler. With a plot straight out of a disturbed harlequin romance, the story seems to intentionally want to distance us from it, but lo and behold, the performances and direction are so good, that we might be surprisingly find ourselves rooting for Adele and Frank to make it work.
What “Labor Day” has to say about misogyny and Stockholm syndrome is something that should be best saved for psychologists but the matter at question is, does it work as a movie? The answer to that is yes. Do we understand why these characters are who they are? No. Yet do we ever really understand people’s motivations? The truth is that few performances in a 2013 film proved to be as moving as Brolin’s and especially Winslet’s who takes irrational fear and turns it into the kind of longing Ms. Streep achieved in “The Bridges of Madison County”.
