Labor Day

Plot synopsis:
In 1987, Adele Wheeler is a depressed single mom who lives in a rural home with her 13-year-old son, Henry. While they are clothes shopping, a bloody man approaches Henry and makes them take him home to look after him. The man is revealed to be Frank Chambers, a convict who is wanted by the local police after breaking out of jail. Through flashbacks, it is revealed that Frank is a Vietnam veteran who returned home and married his pregnant girlfriend, Mandy. A year after the baby's birth, Frank and Mandy had a fight, in which he asks if he's even the baby's father. During the fight, he pushed her against a radiator, resulting in her death. Simultaneously, through imagery, it is implied that the baby drowned. Frank was sent to jail for murder.
Adele tells Frank, seen through flashbacks, that she had a number of miscarriages after Henry, culminating with the full-term stillbirth of a baby girl. This has left Adele with severe social anxiety and depression, which Henry's father later explains to Henry as the reasons their marriage failed. Henry has tried to be both a son and a husband (innocently) but he realizes he can't provide all of the things Adele needs. Adele is a passionate woman who loves to dance and teaches both Henry and Frank separately to dance. Frank teaches Henry car repairs and other handyman/fatherly things. He also teaches Adele and Henry how to play baseball and how to bake a peach pie.
Adele and Frank fall in love and plan to escape to Canada with Henry, packing the car and cleaning out the house. Meanwhile, Henry develops a friendship with a mature, but manipulative girl named Eleanor, and goes to see her one more time before they leave. She manipulates him into thinking Adele and Frank are going to abandon him and he accidentally reveals Frank's past. Adele assures Henry she would never leave him. The morning they are going to leave, Henry takes a note to his father's house and leaves it in his mailbox. While he is walking home, a policeman offers to drive him home, and Henry has no choice but to accept. The policeman is suspicious of the packed car and nearly-empty house, but eventually leaves. Adele goes to the bank to get all the money out of her account, and the bankers, too, are suspicious. While Adele is gone, the neighbor comes over to give Adele some cinnamon rolls, and speaks to Frank. She, too, is suspicious of who he may be. Henry's father finds the note that Henry left, and calls the house wondering what is going on. Before Adele, Frank, and Henry can escape, they hear police sirens approaching. Frank ties Henry and Adele up before he goes out to surrender, so that they won't be charged with harboring a fugitive. It is not revealed who called the police to report Frank's presence at the house. Adele wants to plea in Frank's case but is warned by her attorney that if she does, Henry might be taken away from her. She writes letters to Frank but to protect her he returns them all unopened.
Years later, adult Henry has become the successful owner of a pie shop and is contacted by Frank, who has seen Henry and his shop in a magazine. He tells Henry he will be released soon and asks him whether or not he should see his mother again. Henry lets Frank know that his mother is still single and lives in the same house. We see Frank appearing to her and they embrace. Adele and Frank in the Autumn years of their life walk in love and Henry takes solace in the fact that he won't have to worry about her being alone.

Tags: flashback

Review:
The movie tells the story of Adele (Kate Winslet), a woman who slowly shut herself off from the world, relying heavily on her young son Henry (Gattlin Griffith), whose father abandoned them to another wife and other children.
If you're interested in a good adult romantic drama, look no further than the movie "Labor Day." Superior acting by Kate Winslet, Josh Brolin and young Gattlin Griffith, this is a story with multi- layered depth and haunting flashbacks through dreams ...
The movie Labor Day stars Kate Winslet, Gattlin Griffith, and Josh Brolin.
I also think Gattlin Griffith, who plays Adele's son Henry, shows his characters struggle of having to be the "man" of the house in a very powerful way.
Kate, Josh and Gattlin are fantastic at giving the sense of not knowing what will happen to them in the near future and it really raises the stakes for the family.Something else that I love about this film is how throughout the movie there are short flashbacks of the past and it is done in such a way that it is hard to tell whose past it is.
"I'm a lot stronger than you think." "I don't doubt that." Adele and Frank.Director Jason Reitman is no stranger to unusual family stories (Juno) or character drama (Up in the Air), so his enjoyable Labor Day is a bit of both without the humor.
Because this is January, a dead-zone time for releases, it's even more impressive as an audience-pleasing drama about an escaped convict Frank (Josh Brolin) and a mother he kidnaps, Adele (Kate Winslet), along with her 7th grade son, Henry (Gattlin Griffith).Let's get the formula out now: she falls in love with her captor and the son willingly learns about life and baseball.
Yet Reitman and novelist Joyce Maynard have crafted a story that slowly makes believable the growing love between captive and captor, a relationship helped by the classy acting chops of Winslet and Brolin.
As Reitman slowly reveals their mutually grim backgrounds, we are aware that her needs for the touch of a lover are so acute that even this gamble could be worth the risk.Although Labor Day comes close to Nicholas Sparks' sentimental claptrap, Reitman preserves everyone's dignity, lets love grow, and ushers a kid into a complicated world of love and danger—a labor of love, so to speak, on the film's titular weekend, typically American and hard work: "I sensed my inadequacy," says the adult Henry in voice over.
what happens over one Labor Day. Kate Winslet and Josh Brolin star in "Labor Day," a 2013 film directed by Jason Reitman and also starring Gattlin Griffith and Toby McGuire.Winslet plays Adele, a divorced woman who has never really recovered from being alone; her husband has remarried, and she lives in a ramshackle house whose interior speaks of her depression.
So it doesn't look like they abetted him, he ties Adele and Henry up, planning to leave that evening.This movie is a great example of how a totally predictable story where not much happens can still be a wonderful film and a work of art - in fact, more of a work of art because it is so predictable and yet manages to hold interest.
Both Winslet and Brolin act with incredible sensitivity, and Griffith is adorable as Henry, a good kid who sees his mother's unhappiness and doesn't know how to help her.It's a sentimental film, but I didn't mind (well, I wouldn't anyway, but I think even people who don't like sentimentalism won't mind it).
In "Thank You for Smoking" and "Up in the Air" he has offered unique and insightful views into the business world, and in his latest "Labor Day" he continues to intrigue us with a different subject, a fragmented family that yearns to become full again.Kate Winslet, Gattlin Griffith, and Josh Brolin bring palpable chemistry as a tired single mother, her whole-world adolescent son, and a ragged man who walks into their life by chance.
There may be a simple quote that comes to greater significance in a later scene, or a plot device that may start making sense when the film is about to finish.The ending is rather rushed and roughly executed with the older version of Winslet looking eerily lively and the brief appearance of Tobey Maguire that feels superfluous.
the 2 adult leads were great and the kid was also very good.the story is about an escaped convict who gets holed up in a mentally fragile divorcée and her sons home over Labor Day and then what happens the next few days and the consequences of peoples actions even if they didn't mean anything bad by doing such acts.loved the setting in a slow moving beautiful town atmosphere where it seems like everything moves like molasses, there seem to be a calmness to the picture but right underneath that you could feel the uneasiness and hidden angst of each of the characters in this movie.also this is a movie about the coming of age of the boy and some of the logical and illogical choices he makes, including one biggg one that has direct consequences for Josh Brolins character.very very solid movie, bittersweet and moving, almost, but not made me cried.
There is no doubt about the implausibility of a lonely depressed Mother and her Son being picked up by a man in a grocery store (hardly a supermarket)who turns out to be an escaped convict on the run.The fact is that the two characters both in terms of real time acting and in terms of the story line blended and bonded well in my personal view and there is nothing appropriate in trivialising a movie which reaches deep inside our hearts and brings more than a few tears to our eyes while watching it as they both seek to re-discover love and a righteous way to live their life.There are too many films made nowadays focused on action and violence riddled with bad language, perverseness and inappropriate sexuality.This film is well directed, the screenplay story is entirely logical in the circumstances, the acting does not disappoint and the ending of the film was well considered.I am not altogether sure of the implied reference to 'Labor Day' in the title and I was initially put off watching this film for a couple of months because I thought this might be some kind of 'Mum gets pregnant' cheesy love-story film.
(I wanted to escape too.)That faint whiff of failure continued to spread throughout the theater as I sat there dumb-founded watching Labor Day, an inane tale of love and longing, That ever-reliable filmmaker, Jason Reitman (Juno, Up in the Air, Young Adult), has his first misfire and it is an unintentional laugh-fest of overripe characters caught in overwrought situations.
Along with her son, Henry (well played by Gattlin Griffith), Frank kidnaps the two and takes them hostage, only to have this trio of mismatched souls find the true meaning of love and happiness during captivity one fateful September weekend.If the way to a man's heart is through his stomach, then Labor Day's characters must have indigestion the way they chow down on all things edible.
Jason Reitman does well in his direction in handling leading players Kate Winslet and Josh Brolin and the way the son is played by Gattlin Griffith.
Unfortunately, it's also Reitman at his most melodramatic: his excellent cast of actors only just manage to help him drag the film back from the brink of cheesy soap opera.Adele (Kate Winslet) is a depressed, broken single mother suffering from agoraphobia.
Wounded and desperate, Frank finds his way into their car - and, over the course of the Labor Day weekend - into their house and hearts.The resulting film is a curious blend of hasty romance and psychological drama, twisted around a plot that makes little emotional sense.
Brolin, too, lends Frank a soul and heart that the script occasionally denies him, while Griffith is wonderfully natural as a boy who begins to worry what it means when his mother finds happiness that's seemingly independent of his efforts and existence.Of course, there's another reason to watch Labor Day: the infamous scene in which Frank takes a bucket of peaches and teaches his hosts/hostages to make the perfect peach pie.
The movie, based on the novel by Joyce Maynard, tells the tale of a love- and sex-starved single mother (Kate Winslet) who falls in love with the "dreamy" escaped convict (Josh Brolin) who's holding her and her 13-year-old son (Gattlin Griffith) hostage in their rural home on Labor Day weekend 1987.
For about the first 45 minutes or so, the movie actually seems to be endorsing the rather insulting romantic premise that all an attractive young woman needs to spice up her life is a gutter-cleaning, pie-making, baseball-instructing, son-loving man to come along and sweep her off her feet -.criminal background be damned.
But as the focus of our attention shifts from the two unlikely lovers and onto the son who's observing and ultimately commenting on this bizarre situation, the movie deepens into an off-beat and thought-provoking look into the complexities of human nature and of familial relationships (Tobey Maguire provides the narration as the grown-up Henry and makes a brief appearance later in the movie).Winslet, Brolin and Griffith all give remarkable performances, as do Robert Clark Gregg and James Van Der Beek in supporting roles.
On this occasion, she plays a traumatised single mother in a small American town who suddenly finds herself under the control of an escaped convict played ably by Josh Brolin.The story takes place mainly over a Labor Day weekend but, in the course of the film, there are flashbacks relating to the lives of both the principals and, at the end, we jump forward in time.
His newest film Labor Day, based on the book by Joyce Maynard, has the filmmaker venturing off into TV movie territory inhabited by full-fledged melodrama that is both over the top and disengaging.The film stars Academy Award winner Kate Winslet as Adele, a depressed single mother, who along with her son Henry (played by the young Gattlin Griffith), is held captive in their home by an escaped convict named Frank (played by Josh Brolin).
'LABOR DAY': Four Stars (Out of Five)Jason Reitman (The director of such critically acclaimed hits as 'JUNO', 'YOUNG ADULT', 'UP IN THE AIR' and 'THANK YOU FOR SMOKING') wrote and directed this coming-of-age drama about a single mother and her son who take a convict (who's on the run from the law) into their home over Labor Day weekend.
The story is pretty simplistic but the book is supposed be pretty emotional and I think the film rises above it's storyline as well, thanks to a great cast and Reitman's excellent directing.It's narrated by Henry Wheeler (Griffith) when he's an adult in present day (Tobey Maguire).
The plot of LABOR DAY is straightforward enough: depressed single mum Adele (Kate Winslet) struggles to look after thirteen-year-old Henry (Gattlin Griffith).
Suddenly an escaped prisoner Frank (Josh Brolin) rudely interrupts the rhythm of their lives - although initially frightened of him, both Adele and Henry come to admire Frank as he helps to create a new (and idyllic) family life for them.The plot is a familiar one, exploited for horrific effect in movies such as THE NIGHT OF THE HUNTER (1955), but here used to prompt reflection on precisely what constitutes a so-called "criminal" mind.
Having read the book, I knew what was going to happen so in some ways it took away any of the suspense that existed in the film for people who were seeing the story for the first time.I think the book fills in the details of the characters' lives better than the film does, however the director obviously had to choose how to provide the background stories of Adele and Frank, and given their individual pasts, it wasn't an easy feat.
The director did an admirable job in my opinion, yet I don't know if I hadn't read the book if I'd have been able to piece together Frank's story all that well.The casting of Kate Winslet and Josh Brolin was very inspired and they each captured their characters believably.
Based on a novel by Joyce Maynard and adapted for the screen by Reitman, the film features Kate Winslet as Adele Wheeler, a zombie-like mother of thirteen-year-old Henry (Gattlin Griffith), depressed after her divorce from her unforgiving husband, Gerald (Clark Gregg) who dumped her to marry his secretary.Narrated by Tobey Maguire as the adult Henry and set in 1987 in Massachusetts, the fugitive Frank is played by Josh Brolin who looks like he just escaped from a beer commercial rather than the penitentiary.
For some reason that has nothing to do with a contrived plot, the fierce-looking, wounded Frank, just happens to be hanging around the store after escaping from the hospital following an appendectomy (of course, where else would a convicted murderer on-the-run go but to a department store?) Forced to give him a ride to her house, Adele buys his story that he just wants to stay a few hours and meekly agrees to be tied her up to keep up appearances.Fond of all this attention, Adele asks him to stay another day because of the uncertain train schedule and he ends up as a house guest for the Labor Day weekend.
A Super-Hero of Sorts (notice the comic books sprinkled within) Fantasy come to Life for Depressed Mom Kate Winslet complete with Smoldering Good Looks and the Skills of a Heavenly Sent Handyman/Father.A Pretentious Director will Set these Things in a Bygone Decade for some Inconceivable Notion, except Maybe to Show-Off Memorabilia like Posters, Toys, and Comics to give the Movie a Kinda-Cool Look (like those dying leaves).
The plot of this movie that we are familiar with of Adele played by Kate Winslet and her 13-year old son Henry, played by Gattlin Griffith hiding an escaped convict, Frank played by Josh Brolin from authorities, and seeing him for who he is.
This film tells the story of a depressed single woman and her son, who helps harbouring a fugitive over the Labot Day weekend.To be honest, if it was not for the presence of Kate Winslet, I would probably not have watched "Labor Day".
24 March 2014 Film of Choice at The Plaza Tonight - Labour Day. This is the tale of Adele (Kate Winslet) and her son Henry (Gattlin Griffith) and an escaped felon called Frank (Josh Brolin).
That Labor Day features not an ounce of genuine wit is just one of its many flaws in a tale that squanders an opportunity to create any type of emotional sparks.In the telling of Joyce Maynard's story Reitman has made the cardinal sin of tailoring a film that never once feels like it is going anywhere fast, a slow moving and wholly predictable affair that culminates in one of the worst final acts you're likely to see in some time.
Moments within the film are supposed to show us a bond between these two lost souls, whether it's a heated pie making experience or a game of baseball in the backyard but believability is almost shot away completely when this romance takes place over a couple of days.Many aspects of Labor Day either feel forced or utterly unbelievable – elements such as Frank just wondering about outside fixing the house as the whole towns police force search for him just one example – and a story that should of mixed in a coming of age tale with a genuinely affecting romance, merely becomes a watchable yet instantly forgettable journey with some miss-timed direction by director Reitman.2 far from normal pie making experiences out of 5.
Labor Day took me through an amazing story about life,the pictures film location and the cast was well received,the directing ques to story line and the actors talent to project the true emotions of there experiences are heart felt and rewarding as a great movie should be.once this story grabs you and frees your traditional perspective and thought pattern an amazing life to live opens up for acceptance.
Meanwhile, he makes repairs to the house, teaches Henry to play ball, does some cooking and baking, among other things.The performances from the lead actors were very good but I found this film hard to follow due to the flash forwards of a young man's life.
It's a romantic drama that is masquerading as a crime film.Josh Brolin plays an escaped convict who holds Kate Winslet (and her son) hostage while his wounds heal.
Labor DayIf hosting an escaped convict at your home this Labor Day, you may want to enact the No White rule prematurely.Thankfully, the blood splatter in this romantic drama is kept to a minimum.Henry (Gattlin Griffith) and his mother (Kate Winslet) are taken hostage by a fleeing felon, Frank (Josh Brolin).Held up at their house, Frank's genial nature gets the best of him and soon he takes on a fatherly role - not only around the house but also in the boudoir.Eventually, he proposes a move to Canada to start a new life.
Maybe Reitman was trying to expand his directorial range with "Labor Day," but sadly he delivered an insufficient dramatic film.Divorced and lonely, Adele (portrayed by Kate Winslet) lives in seclusion with her son, Henry (Gattlin Griffith), after surviving a thorny personal past.
It features Kate Winslet and Josh Brolin as the main characters,Adele and Frank respectively,together with Gattlin Griffith Tobey Maguire.It was directed by Jason Reitman.The story focuses on the experiences of 13-year-old Henry Wheeler, who struggles to be the man of his house and care for his reclusive and depressed mother Adele,who was left by her husband.
Labor Day (2013): Dir: Jason Reitman / Cast: Josh Brolin, Kate Winslet, Gattlin Griffith, Brighid Fleming, Tobey Maguire: Manipulative drivel about a long weekend that brought passion and love in the most unexpected way.