Labor Day (2013)

Jason Reitman built a career on acid-tongued cynicism, then elected to adapt Joyce Maynard's novel about a depressed single mother who takes in an escaped convict over a long weekend in 1987. The result is a film that asks us to find tenderness in a hostage scenario and mostly settles for peach pie. Kate Winslet plays Adele with a trembling fragility that the camera adores, and Josh Brolin plays Frank with a chiseled decency that the script insists upon. He fixes the house, teaches the boy to pitch, shows everyone how to bake. It plays like a home-repair infomercial with a body count in the backstory.

The film has no interest in the world beyond its own porch. Race does not exist here. Class does not exist here. Sexuality beyond the heterosexual variety does not exist here. Adele's sadness is treated as a condition to be cured by the arrival of a large, capable man, which the film frames as romance and which plays, on reflection, as a slightly unsettling fantasy about being repaired. There is no social instruction to deliver, no sermon to preach, no cause to advance. It simply wants us to feel something about a woman learning to leave her own house.

What remains is craft in service of very little. The 1987 setting is wallpaper, the performances are committed, the soundtrack is tasteful, and the plot is nonsense dressed in linen. Critics at the time found it pallid and implausible, and they were correct. It is a film about longing that never quite locates what anyone is longing for. We are left with a peach pie and a shrug. The pie looks good, at least. That much cannot be disputed, and it is the only thing here that cannot be disputed.