Saturday, February 01, 2014
"Labor Day", in January, and in New England, with the Stockholm Syndrome
“Labor Day”, from Indian Paintbrush and director Jason
Reitman and this time distributed under the full Paramount brand (instead of
Paramount Vantage), has gotten a lot of hype, but it is a 2014 film, not in the
Oscar race. The premise of the story stretches
credibility for me, at least, but it’s based on a novel by Joyce Maynard. One can suppose that it demonstrates writing
talent to be able to tell a story about characters doing things we don’t think
we would do, to step out of the writer’s own me-centeredness.
In southern New Hampshire around 1982 (the film was shot in nearby
Massachusetts, away from the mountains) a single mother Adele (Kate Winslet)
raises her 12-year-old son Henry (Gatlin Griffith), his voice just having
changed. It’s clear that he is very
articulate and sharp and will soon be a socially competitive teenager, able to
fit in even if he likes cooking and dance. The story, in fact, is narrated by a married thirty-something
Henry, who as an adult runs New England restaurants, played by Tobey Maguire,
who appears only once at the end. (Here,
a female writer puts herself in the shoes of a male character. I’m not really willing to do that as a
fiction writer, and that could be seen as a problem.)
On Thursday before Labor Day, Adele and Henry go to a small
neighborhood grocery. Henry is accosted
by an escaped con, Frank (Josh Brolin).
He leads him to his mother, and Frank is able to make his threats
credible enough that Adele and Henry shelter him away from the police in their
home. (It's well to recall that a horrific home invasion in Connecticut in 2007 started with a grocery store visit, though.)
I’m not sure I buy that sequence. And I know what happens later could be seen
as part of the so-called Stockholm Syndrome.
Still, the film gives us flashbacks of tragic events in the past for
both Adele and Frank. Adele begins to
fall in love with Frank, which again I don’t buy. Henry seems to go along with it, but figures
out a way to get to his divorced father and get a tip out. I hope that’s not too much of a give-away,
but you really don’t believe that the couple will go the route of Bonnie and
Clyde (often mentioned toward the end of the movie). And you know from the narration that it turns
out well for Henry. He even learned to
become a baseball player from Frank (in one sequence, the set up a tiny Fenway
in their back yard, and Henry can reach the fences).
There was a particularly shocking homophobic line in one
scene involving Henry. And in a couple
spots, Josh bordered on harming him. We
know the time frame from the encapsulated references to Steven Spielberg
movies, especially “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” and “The E.T.”.
The official site is here.
The song “Stay” in the previews doesn’t appear in the real
movie. But there is a similar piece of classical music for piano by a lesser
known composer, Sor.
I saw this film at the Angelika Mosaic on a Saturday
afternoon, before a fair crowd. There
was a 5-minute short from Focus Forward, “A Glacier in the Desert”, about a
sculptor who hires technology just to create such.
Picture: Tilton, NH, my visit, July 2011, also a visit in May 1961 on a school trip.
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