Labor Day (2013)

(In French, On Cable TV, July 2022) I can’t figure out whether Labor Day was going for formula romantic drama or atonal mess. Screenwriter-director Jason Reitman, usually comfortable in far more cynical fare, here adapts a Joyce Maynard novel as straight as possible. This is remarkable considering that the story seems ready-made for criticism—its deliberate use of romantic tropes is about as obvious as it comes, and going through it all in soft-focus languid pacing often brings viewers to ask, “Really? You’re really going to do this?” more than anything else. Manipulative to an exceptional degree, the film starts with a single mother being seduced by an escaped convict (but a really manly one; so manly that he becomes a surrogate father to our teenage protagonist over a single Labor Day weekend) and then plays out a fantasy of a reconstituted family. But, having written itself into a happy ending before its time was up, the film then goes off into another more suspenseful vein until it can pull its cards to set up a ridiculously contrived climax spanning decades. It’s that kind of film, and I suppose that the actors shouldn’t be criticized for playing into archetypes—Kate Winslet does well as the lonely divorcee, while Josh Brolin probably chuckled for days at the chance to play an exemplary man (what’s an accidental murder when you can do everything around the house?) There are more than a few other familiar faces in the cast (J. K. Simmons, Clark Gregg, James Van Der Beek, Maika Monroe), with everyone sticking to the surface requirements of their roles. There’s no doubt that Labor Day is, to put it bluntly, not a film for me—it’s in between a romantic fantasy for lonely women, perhaps a semi-nostalgic wish fulfillment do-over for aimless teenagers, maybe a sort of innocuous date-night kind of film. But it feels bizarre, jumping from romantic fantasy to suspense thriller to bafflingly erotic-subtext sequences and presenting the material in purely straightforward fashion. I get that Reitman saw this film as an occasion to stretch beyond his usual boundaries, but there’s stretching and then there’s capitulation and, in the end, Labor Day seems more like a calculated attempt to slum through easy material than something actually successful at what it tries to do.