Review of Labor Day (2013) by Ben L — 19 Aug 2014

It's hard for me to describe all the things that are wrong with this movie. For starters, if you've seen the trailer then you've seen the entire movie. This movie is so devoid of story that it literally could have been a 15 minute short film and you wouldn't have lost a single thing. For those that have not seen the trailer Labor Day is basically Stockholm Syndrome the movie. An escaped convict invades the home of a divorced mom and her son. Being the first male she's been in contact with since the divorce she almost instantly falls in love with the man despite his implied threats of hurting her son. In about 30 seconds of film time the convict, played by Josh Brolin, completely switches from being a threat to being the greatest husband/father EVER. He's a brilliant chef, he fixes up the house, he teaches the boy to play ball, and still finds time to meet Kate Winslet's sexual needs as well (which was a relief because I really feared this movie was headed in a very incestuous direction between the mother and son.) In fact Brolin never really acted all that threatening. One of the big flaws in this film is that it doesn't create any tension through actual events, instead we are basically told how to feel by the music and the reactions of Kate Winslet.

Perhaps the worst part (I'm going to spoil the movie here but I highly encourage you not to see it anyways) is that Josh Brolin's character, Frank, isn't even a dangerous criminal. Throughout the film they show these flashbacks of his crime. They are presented terribly because the director did such a poor job of establishing a time period for the film that you can't tell the flashback is taking place in a different time. For awhile it just felt like random scenes from some other town they were jumping to for no particular reason. Anyways we find that Frank was someone who accidentally killed his cheating wife coincidentally at the same moment she had killed her child. So he's not a violent personality who could potentially be a danger to this family, he's just a guy who lost his temper once and has been living in prison because of it. So the actual thrust of the story is that Brolin and Winslet are playing these characters who have both been searching for true love and they finally found it in one another (because he forced her to by abducting her and her son.) It feels like a tired old Harlequin romance that never should have been made into a film. By the end I was outright laughing at how they went comically overboard creating multiple different ways for Frank to get caught. Labor Day is a disaster of a film which you should avoid at all costs.