Labor Day
A change of pace for Jason Reitman, and a near-disastrous one, Labor Day is an earnest attempt to make an old-fashioned romance that can’t take flight under the weight of its leaden voiceover and disruptive flashbacks. Josh Brolin and Kate Winslet work hard to invest their characters – an escaped convict and a fragile single mother – with as much soulfulness as they can muster, but Reitman can’t generate any heat. His direction feels tepid and self-conscious; the work of a man patently unsuited to the kind of story he is trying to tell.
It’s hard to believe in anything these characters do, and the key moments – notably the much-derided baking scene – come off as laughable. Labor Day is set in 1987 when Jason Reitman was ten years old, a little younger than the film’s narrator, and the close attention paid to evocative period detail is just about the only thing in this picture that rings true. [Philip Concannon]