Cinema R eviews LABOR DAY Not many actresses can look quite so alluring as Kate Winslet with no makeup, disheveled hair and corseted in a dowdy brown sleeveless dress. Frank (Josh Brolin) obviously thinks so too, when he arrives at her doorstep, along with her young son Henry (Gattlin Griffith), after abducting them from the local supermarket. Frank, bleeding from an appendix scar, is on the lam, a convicted murderer who has just escaped from prison. Adele (Winslet) is a single mum battling to cope with social alienation and depression.
Every work of fiction demands a suspension of disbelief and Jason Reitman’s compassionate film of how our need to love and be loved, above all else, goes perilously close to failing this mandatory test. Told by Henry at different stages of his life (the last brief narration, by Toby Maguire, poses the question, ‘why the earlier voice?’), the events unfold over the Labor Day long-weekend – five days that Reitman manages to make seem like weeks. Apart from Adele’s phlegmatic acceptance of Frank’s presence, I found it verging
on the implausible that a hunted killer could be holedup in a suburban house, playing baseball in the yard and working outside on the family car, without somebody noticing. But I was prepared to go with it because of the brooding sexuality that grows between Adele and Frank – even if Reitman, averting explicit carnality, tends to overdo the juicy erotica of a peach-pie-making scene. Meanwhile the pair’s backstories are dealt out in short, sharp flashbacks. Adele’s state of mind is explained by an unbearable loss and
Frank’s crime is revealed as a cruel blow of fate. Winslet’s sensibilities are unerring and Brolin, if a little too stoic, is good as a man wronged. Reitman might have thought twice about his cheesy coda, but all of the pieces of his cryptic jigsaw puzzle eventually come together to complete the unpredictable but satisfying big picture. What is apparent to the outside world is only ever the tip of the iceberg – which is how it is for all of us, isn’t it? ~ John Campbell
to the otherwise neglected but growing demographic of old codgers. Sam (Kevin Kline) is the first of the boyhood
buddies that we meet. Retired to Florida, he’s now seventy and doing aquarobics with a group of fellow ancients. He turns to the withered crone next to him and says, ‘I’m sorry. Was that your foot I trod on? Or your breast?’ Boom boom. Next is Billy (Michael Douglas) in Malibu, the gang’s fake-tan Lothario, explaining to Archie (Morgan Freeman) in New Jersey that the age of his bride-to-be does not make him a cradle-snatcher. ‘She’s nearly thirty-two,’ he pleads. ‘I’ve got a haemorrhoid that’s nearly thirty-two,’ Archie replies drily. I laughed out loud at that one, but it’s all downhill from there. For Kline, Douglas, Freeman and Robert De Niro,
who is recalcitrant Paddy, this is a doddle. The boys have a stags’ reunion in Las Vegas before Billy’s nuptials, at which point the obvious suspicion is that we are going to get The Hangover for the Viagra generation. But the gross-out never eventuates – excessive swearing and binge-drinking are replaced by a string of corny gags and a homage to Las Vegas which, to an outsider who has never had the slightest inclination to go there, only confirms its status as a zombieland of glittering crassness. The thread holding it all together does its vital job, however. Widowed Paddy has issues with Billy, who, despite their shared childhood,
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24 February 11, 2014 The Byron Shire Echo
couldn’t find the time to attend the funeral of Paddy’s wife. The rapprochement between the two men encounters another hurdle when both are attracted to Diana (Mary Steenburgen), a nightclub singer who has been
around the traps but retained her heart of gold. All four guys’ journey is fruitful, none of them do anything bad, and the resolution of the central provocation is as mushy as you always knew it would be. ~ John Campbell
increasingly less interested in the unlikeable lot. The dysfunctional family has been a preferred subject of an angst-ridden generation (especially on TV, the medium in which Wells has primarily worked), but too often its strength is simultaneously its weakness, viz, the stories are peopled by characters who are a pain in the arse. A stellar cast is involved here – besides Streep, there are Julia Roberts, Ewan McGregor, Chris Cooper, Abigail Breslin, Juliette Lewis, Benedict Cumberbatch, Sam Shepard and the fabulously
reptilian Dermot Mulroney – and each woman is given virtuoso scenes in which they are allowed free rein to impress. Gathered from hither and yon, the Westons, with the usual subterranean resentments, go to war at the dinner table and skid unstoppably downhill from there towards the revelation of a dark secret that is just what you’d expect from such a potboiler. It’s expertly done, but I wanted the maid to throttle them all – and the piggy chip woman, too. ~ John Campbell
AUGUST: OSAGE COUNTY Tracy Letts’s Broadway play won every prize on offer, including the Pulitzer, after its Broadway debut in 2007. My cinema companion, however, warned me that when she saw the touring production in Sydney she found it underwhelming. I’m not sure if boring is quite the right word for John Wells’s film adaptation – Letts was screenwriter – but what was boorish in the extreme was the woman who sat in front of us and noisily stuffed her face for the first fifteen minutes with potato crisps. We moved three rows back,
but the crackling and vulgar grinding still infringed, like rats in the roof. It occurred to me later that the awful woman’s lack of consideration for those around her mirrored the self-centredness of Meryl Streep’s drug-addled dowager in this stagey, overwrought black comedy – and I only say ‘black comedy’ because that is how it has been categorised by the cognoscenti. Out of step with most in the audience, who laughed regularly as the Westons tore strips off each other in the wake of the father’s suicide, I grew
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