Director Jason Reitman’s first four features, Thank You For Smoking, Juno, Up in the Air, and Young Adult, didn’t have a whole lot in common, content-wise, but they were each crafted well enough that it made sense that they were made by the same guy. That’s not really the case with his latest film, Labor Day, which is an adaptation he wrote of a novel by Joyce Maynard, though. With Labor Day he’s made a film that’s so clumsy and tone deaf that one has to wonder what existed in the source material to make him want to turn it into a movie in the first place.
The story here sees Josh Brolin playing an escaped convict trying to avoid a pretty large-scale manhunt that’s hot on his trail by holing up in a house that’s inhabited by a single mother played by Kate Winslet and her son, who is played by Gattlin Griffith. What starts out as a hostage situation pretty quickly turns into a holiday weekend bonding experience where Brolin and Winslet’s characters fall in love, Griffith’s character begins to see Brolin’s as a father, and nobody bats an eyelash at the fact that what should have reasonably been several years of character development gets crammed into a few days of ham-fisted, implausible melodrama. Labor Day is one of those movies that seems like it was made by aliens who are trying to pass themselves off as human, but who haven’t yet nailed down the intricacies of the species.
While the pulsing score is heavy-handed, Winslet’s jittery performance is too maudlin, and in general the film’s dialogue and storytelling plays like amateur schlock that’s straight out of a high school creative writing class, Labor Day did have a couple of things going for it that were keeping it from being a complete failure for most of its run time. Namely, Brolin gives an understated and affecting performance and the camera work is all really lovely. But in the third act things get wrapped up in such a saccharine, paint by numbers, rock-stupid fashion that the film shits the bed so thoroughly it completely erases the memory of any good qualities it brought to the table alongside the crap. Labor Day doesn’t even feel like a real movie. It feels like a non-comedic spoof or something. Kill it with fire, bury its ashes deep, and let’s never speak of it again.
