AN UNEXPECTED HOUSE GUEST?Josh Brolin and Kate Winslet star in 'Labor Day'.
Making a dog’s dinner of it
Cinema
Daniel Carey
IN 1987, Dessie O’Hare and three other members of the INLA kidnapped Dublin dentist John O’Grady. After ransom demands were not met, O’Hare cut off the little finger from each of O’Grady’s hands with a hammer and chisel and sent them to Carlow Cathedral.
O’Hare was eventually arrested after a shoot-out in Co Kilkenny, but while he was being hunted down by the Gardaí, I lived in fear that the man nicknamed ‘The Border Fox’ was going to show up at my door and cut off my fingers. It was, of course, highly unlikely that a seven-year-old boy in south Mayo would be O’Hare’s next target. But I was an easily unnerved child – too old to believe in monsters, but old enough to read the papers.
‘Labor Day’ (there’s no ‘u’ in either the American or the international release) tells the story of a weekend in 1987 when an escaped convict takes refuge in the house of a depressed divorcée and her 15-year-old son. But unlike the contemporaneous real-life manhunt in Ireland, no real sense of fear pervades this melodrama.
Josh Brolin plays a man named Frank Chambers. Like the former senator from Newport, he has a beard. Like the YouTube video recorded by his Fianna Fáil namesake before the 2007 election, much of the action takes place in the kitchen. Frank is a convicted murderer who’s managed to escape from prison, and ends up going home with Adele Wheeler (Kate Winslet) and her son Henry (Gattlin Griffith) after meeting them when they’re out shopping.
On the face of it, ‘Labor Day’ has a lot going for it. Based on a novel by Jason Maynard, it’s written and directed by Jason Reitman, whose previous hits include ‘Juno’ and ‘Up In The Air’. It has a decent cast. There’s potential in the set-up.
But the plot is ludicrous, and a picture that uses food as a motif is a dog’s dinner. One of the movie’s many flaws is that, despite his past, any sense of unease the viewer has about Frank quickly passes. Yes, he briefly ties Adele up – to keep up appearances. But he also does odd-jobs around the house and makes a peach pie, and she falls in love with him. The focus is not on what might happen to the family, but rather whether one of the neighbours will discover their house guest. The reason for his 18-year prison sentence is flagged only in blink-and-you’ll-miss-them flashbacks and interrupted newsflashes.
“Don’t forget what’s going on here,” Frank warns Adele at one point. “Not for a second,” she responds, but it seems she (and those behind the movie) do just that, as we move from hostage situation to ‘us against the world’. Frank says he should go, but is prevailed upon to stay by mother and son. If I was to pinpoint the exact second when ‘Labor Day’ lost me, it was when an older Henry recalls of Frank: “He ironed, and in return, my mom taught him to rumba.” Tension, largely absent, only arrives late on, during a scene in a bank. There’s a clumsy reveal and an overly busy epilogue.
Henry’s teenage love interest (played by Maika Monroe) gets most of the best lines in a ho-hum script. “When people have sex,” she warns Henry, “it attacks their brains.” I’m pretty sure this is not scientifically true. So if anybody would like to make an alternative suggestion as to why so many good people attach themselves to such an ill-advised project, I’m all ears.
Rating 4 out of 10
