It’s hard to know what to say about Labor Day that the box office hasn’t already said.
Tossed into theaters at the end of January on Super Bowl weekend, this uncomfortable tale of unlikely romance failed to earn back a third of the $18 million it cost to make, despite being released on thousands of screens.
I know and like director Jason Reitman’s other work (Juno, Up in the Air, Thank You for Smoking). But this movie has none of the crisp dialogue, barbed humor, or painful truths of Reitman’s other work.
If you’ve seen the trailer, you know the premise (and, bluntly, you’ve already seen the best this movie has to offer): over the course of a weekend, a tough-but-sensitive pie-making hunk of a convict invades the home of a clinically depressed and sex-starved divorcee. He ties her up. He feeds her homemade chili. He teaches her son to throw a baseball. He plays the guitar.
Despite rough edges, our convict is so adorable that he convinces the divorcee to cash out her bank account, uproot her son, and run away with him to Canada.
There’s tremendous potential here for an undercurrent of darkness. Can the criminal be trusted? Is he really guilty of murder? Is his gentility an act? Once Kate Winslet cashes out her meager savings, will Josh Brolin take the money and run?
Unfortunately, while the audience is asking those questions, the movie never does. The characters say and do things that have no grounding in authenticity or sensibility, and we, in the seats, are left wondering what else we could have spent our eleven dollars on.
Like the holiday it’s named for, Labor Day seems to have forgotten whatever purpose its creators had in mind. Despite an attractive cast (and surprise appearances by Dawson and SpiderMan), it’s one to miss.
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