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