Labor Day (**3/4)

Some movies stand out for their plots, and some for their characters. This drama has a plot —a mother and son taken hostage by an escaped convict — that would tend to stand out, but what in fact makes the strongest impression is the character of Adele, played by Kate Winslet. Winslet has rarely played this kind of character. Adele is a fragile woman, certainly not the kind of woman who would cry out when a quietly insistent man (Josh Brolin) with a wound in his side coerces her into giving him a lift in a department store. This occurs in a small New England town in the year 1987, but a 1987 that seems very long ago, at least the way that director Jason Reitman has filmed it.

The story is not told from Adele’s viewpoint, though. Rather, adopting the approach of the Joyce Maynard novel, it is told as a coming-of-age story for her 13-year-old son Henry. Henry (Gattlin Griffith) is the sensitive, but mostly average, child, of a mother who, according to the narration of the adult Henry (Tobey McGuire), is not so much devastated by the absence of a husband as by the absence of love. Her ex-husband, not a man who knows how to deal with a fragile woman, or a sensitive son, lives nearby with his new wife. And so, as if ordered up for the purpose, the convict shows up to provide a life lesson for the boy and inspiration for the mother. Yes, the man ties them up, but then he cooks for them and cleans up. Of his incarceration, he says, there is more to the story. We learn the truth in a clever way, but if Adele ever asks, we do not see it. The story is told like poetry, prettily, but my non-poetic self asks, Why does she not ask? Why does a man who’s served most of his sentence break out of jail?

I’m of two minds about the use of the present-day narrator. On the one hand, the device provides adult perspective to the confusion of childhood and a voice to an inarticulate character. On the other, as a literary, rather than a cinematic, device, the interruption of the disembodied voice can rob a story of a certain immediacy, and allow us to forget that the present we experience was conditional, not pre-ordained. And it’s a slight-of-hand, placing events decades apart together, pushing the past and present together when in real life memories fade and people continue to chance. The poetic ending of this movie, along with the tough-to-believe plot, pushes it slightly too far into Nicholas Sparks territory. Of course, many people like Nicholas Sparks, the author of Dear John, The Notebook, etc., and if you’re one of them, you’ll probably like this movie also.

IMDb link

viewed 10/25/13 8:00 pm at Prince Music Theater; scheduled to post 11/8/13; posted 1/31/14

Moonrise Kingdom (***3/4)

The best clue to whether you’ll like a Wes Anderson movie is whether you’ve liked other Wes Anderson movies. That’s not necessarily true of most other directors, or even most writer-directors, but even when translated to animation, as in 2009’s fantastic Fantastic Mr. Fox, the hallmarks of Anderson’s style remain intact. In the opening minutes of his young-love tale, we see them—the curious use of the zoom lens, and split screens, and especially the bright colors. The random elements, like Bob Balaban as the on-screen narrator discussing this history of the small (fictional) island of New Penzance, where most the story takes place. He even, lately, uses his own titling font, a la Woody Allen. In the main, I have found that these hallmarks both maintain interest and place the viewer at a remove. Watching Anderson’s work, which includes The Darjeeling Limited and The Royal Tenenbaums, one doesn’t so much suspend one’s disbelief as ignore it and marvel at the inventiveness so prominently on display.

But even though I’ve just said that, it is possible that someone who didn’t like other Anderson movies might like this one, because of all his movies, the ones where genuine emotion does creep in the most are his two about young love, Rushmore (about a teen boy’s crush on a teacher), and this one, about a a boy and a girl who are not even teens, yet decide to run away together. They are smart kids, articulate even, and they are about as unusual as Anderson’s adult characters, but there was still some kind of realness about them. Both played by first-time actors, they are particular characters. We see this in the boy’s digressions about scouting, and in the way the girl brings along her record player and her favorite books, not common ones another filmmaker might use to evoke the time period, the mid-1960s in this case, but ones that she would have felt were hers alone. Most likely you will not precisely identify with these children, but will perhaps remember the way you too had a now-faded obsession or favorite object at a similar age. You will remember when you wanted to be older and allowed to do what you wanted.

In other words, while much of the plotting, which involves a scout leader (Edward Norton), an officer (Bruce Willis), and the girl’s parents (Frances McDormand, Bill Murray) tracking down the missing couple, has the slightly artificial quality I associate with Anderson, I forgot that in the scenes with the two young leads, and to some extent in the scenes with the officer and the boy, who is an orphan. They speak to the sense of being alone felt by many children. Even the way the children are played by actors who look the actual ages, she being taller than him, helps set these segments in a reality. They place the audience in that time of life where one has begun to understand the world enough to see its possibilities and want to grasp them.

IMDb link

viewed 7/5/12 7:45 at Ritz East and reviewed 7/5/12, 7/12/12

Dan in Real Life (**1/2)

This is a movie about love at first sight. The victim, Dan, is an advice columnist, widower, and father of three girls (Steve Carrell), and the object of his adoration is a free spirit (Juliette Binoche) he meets in a bookstore in a fashion that probably can only happen in a screenplay. (No matter how charmed a woman is by a man, she will not scoop up both a Pablo Neruda poetry volume and “Everybody Poops” and buy both.) The setting is a New England family reunion, and the conflict arises when Dan learns that he is smitten with his brother’s (Dane Cook) girlfriend. Through pancake breakfasts and group jazz-ercise and charades, Dan is tormented, but in a sort of light-comedy way rather than one that will make the audience feel truly sad for him. Similarly played is the angst of the daughters, the oldest of whom Dan does not wish to drive, and the second oldest of whom he does not wish to date. The youngest, a fourth grader, remains loyal as the others resent him, though in a way that suggests it will all pass. (As the middle daughter, Brittany Robertson lends believability to her teen heartsickness, though.)

Light on plot, only occasionally corny, the movie pleasantly winds down a road whose end is only too clear. The delicately buoyant score and songs by Sondre Lerche give the film a gentle, wistful feel. I only wish there was something more than surface appeal. One of the hardest things to do really well, I think, is to credibly show people connecting. Director-writer Peter Hedges, who previously made the pretty-good indie hit Pieces of April, accomplishes this largely with a montage scene. Yet the entire film revolves around the viewer being convinced that, via an afternoon of conversation, Dan cannot forget this woman who, it is implied, is the first he’s been interested in since his wife died.

Maybe it’s me, but it would have given the movie some dramatic heft if there’d been a little more pathos to the story. Even the end, which does not involve the brothers deciding to share, is too easy, like you can have a plot like this without anyone getting truly hurt. (The losing brother gets what I call the consolation girlfriend, an annoyingly overused plot device used to avoid having the audience feel bad for or about any of the characters. See just about any Hollywood movie involving a romantic rivalry, unless one of the rivals is a total jerk.) I guess you’d call this a feel-good picture, but it would have been better had Hedges let us feel a little sadness too.

IMDB link

reviewed 10/27/07