Идеалистка

The Weight of Summer Heat

Jason Reitman spent the first stretch of his career getting very good at one particular tone: the arch, knowing smirk. Between the quick-fire cynicism of *Juno* and the polished emotional distance of *Up in the Air*, irony was his native language. So when I sat down to watch *Labor Day* (2013), I kept bracing for some wink or release valve. It never arrives. Reitman swaps out the snark for a humid, almost overripe sincerity that feels lifted from a Douglas Sirk melodrama. Set across a sweltering weekend in 1987, the movie asks for a lot: an escaped convict, gut wound and all, takes a lonely single mother and her teenage son hostage, then somehow turns into the ideal father figure they didn’t know they were waiting for. I still don’t fully buy the equation. (A home invasion shouldn’t slide this neatly into domestic wish fulfillment.) But the film is so fragile to the touch that writing it off isn’t quite that easy.



A lot of that fragility comes from Kate Winslet. She plays Adele, an agoraphobic divorcee who seems to be slowly sinking into the woodwork of her New England house. Winslet has played trapped suburban disappointment before, especially in *Little Children*, but the physical choices here are different. She doesn’t stalk around with frustration; she folds in on herself. Watch her hands when she tries to write a check at the bank. Her fingers shake with a small, panicked tremor, and her eyes flick around like something cornered indoors. Then Josh Brolin shows up as Frank, the convict who walks into her kitchen and suddenly occupies all the empty air in the place. Brolin carries his size with a calm, compressed threat that gradually loosens into something improbably gentle. *Elle*'s Karen Durbin got the dynamic exactly right when she wrote that "Frank and Adele do not meet cute—they meet desperate." His physical force against her brittleness creates a pull the movie keeps returning to.



That pull is nowhere clearer than in the notorious pie-baking scene. If this film has one piece of cultural afterlife, it’s that. Frank decides to teach Adele and her son Henry, played with quiet attentiveness by Gattlin Griffith, how to make a peach pie from scratch. Described plainly, it sounds absurd: a fugitive instructing his hostages in pastry technique. Maybe it is absurd. But Reitman shoots it with such intense sensual focus that resisting it becomes difficult. The camera closes in on their flour-coated hands meeting over the bowl. You hear the wet slap of peaches, the steady drag of the rolling pin, the dense breathing hanging in the hot kitchen air. Eric Steelberg lights the room in a faded end-of-summer gold. It stops feeling like a cooking lesson and starts reading as a desperate, mostly wordless bargain between two people starved for touch.



Does it hold together all the way through? Not really. The third act gets bogged down in blunt flashbacks and plot contrivances that expose the machinery of Joyce Maynard’s source novel a little too clearly. I caught myself rolling my eyes at how neatly everyone’s trauma gets explained. Real pain usually isn’t arranged so symmetrically. But when the story details blur, the mood stays behind. What lingers is the thick, unmoving air of a house that has finally let out a breath. *Labor Day* is flawed, and sometimes almost painfully earnest, but there’s something exposed and tender about watching Reitman work outside his usual register. It asks for a huge leap of faith and gives back a quiet reminder of how badly people want rescue when they’ve gone too long without it.