From the week of April 29th, Paramount is releasing Jason Reitman's romantic melodrama Labor Day. In the four features prior to this one, Reitman had established himself as a satirist-humanist in the vein of Preston Sturges; Thank You for Smoking, Juno, Up in the Air, and his underrated Young Adult all overcame their high-concept setups through character empathy and refreshing dark humor. But melodrama is a completely different beast, and the wholly misbegotten Labor Day is evidence that Reitman desperately needs sharp comedy to balance out his maudlin tendencies, tendencies that he layers on syrup-thick here. Labor Day makes Juno seem nihilistic. It's the romance-novel ready tale (adapted from a quite-good Joyce Maynard novel, actually) of a sensitive escaped convict (Josh Brolin, underplaying nicely and giving the film's best performance) who kidnaps a troubled young mother (Kate Winslet, doing the hammiest and least convincing work of her career) and her impressionable son (Gattlin Griffith); in no time, Brolin and Winslet's characters develop a powerful romantic attraction to one another, and he sets about restoring her damaged psyche and becoming the strong father figure that Griffith never had.
For a while, you keep waiting for Reitman to give this soap-opera fluff a unique spin, to undercut its beyond-silly plot contrivances, but he never approaches the material with anything less than a straight face. Maybe he's trying to be Douglas Sirk, but what Reitman doesn't seem to get is that Sirk rarely just made melodramas – Sirk made room in films like All That Heaven Allows for all sorts of sly cultural and social criticisms, none of which are present here. If Labor Day has anything going for it, it's that it's funny, but only in a so-bad-it's-hilarious kind of way. Reitman shoots Brolin and Winslet's culinary bonding with a heaving, turgid sense of passion – the look on Winslet's face as Brolin mixes pie dough is practically orgasmic – and he even tosses in a ridiculous CGI-version of Griffith's character as he ages that would look out of place in the Star Wars prequels. With any luck, Reitman will rebound from this. Here's hoping he never tries to repeat this experiment.
In his Blu-ray review, Martin Liebman took a very different opinion of the film, writing that "Labor Day certainly knows how to lure in its audience from the get-go. The film crafts an immediate sense of mystery and dread through a basic yet haunting score that's matched by an equally foreboding dramatic structure, particularly in its opening act. The film's opening musical notes, notes that set the tone for that chilling overlay, juxtapose against beautiful green landscaping that, together, embody the entire movie's basic structure that's all about imbalance and the slow progression to an uneasy equilibrium that evolves into joy and finally comes back full circle to that dread and imbalance. Reitman doesn't play his audience, though. He simply tells the story and shapes it in a manner that explicitly defines where it is in the narrative while also reminding audiences of where it's been and hinting towards where it's headed. It's startlingly effective and knowledgeable direction, a perfect compliment to a unique story that will leave the audience experiencing a broad array of emotions while transfixed on both the larger story and the nuances that shape it."
From Twentieth Century Fox comes the drama Notes on a Scandal. At first glance, the film appears to be a character study of Barbara Covett (Judi Dench), a lonely secondary-school teacher who strikes up a tentative friendship with free-spirited art teacher Sheba Hart (Cate Blanchett, excelling in a comparatively "normal" role). If the film were nothing more than the evolution of their relationship, it would still be a little gem. Dench, in particular, is more affecting here than she's been in a long time, and she makes Barbara's feelings towards Sheba wonderfully complex – Barbara has a strong undercurrent of unrequited love towards the younger woman, yet as palpable as that longing feels, it also seems to bring Barbara out of her shell. But about halfway through, the picture takes a dark turn, and suddenly, we're in Patricia Highsmith territory. To say too much more would be spoiling the fun, save for that Sheba isn't as carefree as she appears and Barbara definitely isn't some fragile spinster. In a lot of ways, this is Dench's Tom Ripley; it's the finest, most disturbing performance she's ever given.
Cinedigm is bringing Escape from Tomorrow to Blu-ray this week as a Best Buy-exclusive. The film certainly has a unique hook: director Randy Moore tells the story of disturbed family man Jim (Roy Abramsohn) descending into madness while at vacation at Disney World, and for added verisimilitude, he shot most of the picture at both Disney World and Disneyland. As that brief plot synopsis suggests, this is hardly Disney-friendly material (besides staging the Small World and Soarin' rides as locations of surreal terror, Moore has characters intimate that the staff employees playing Disney princesses are expensive call girls), so Moore and his creative team used high-end consumer cameras to film on Disney property without raising the suspicions of Disney's security team. From a technical level, the gambit mostly paid off. Outside of a few obviously green-screened sequences (apparently security semi-realized what was going on near the end of "production"), Disney World becomes a very real character in the film, and that creates a wonderful disconnect between the story's casual surrealism and the iconic, "safe" image of the surroundings. Plus, Moore takes full advantage of his stolen sets, and he manages to make a movie on the sly that still feels professionally composed and shot.
For those reasons alone, Escape from Tomorrow merits attention. As a story, though, it's a lot less effective. Abramsohn's psychological torment comes off like low-grade David Lynch; the first half conveys his madness through distorted imagery and CGI-augmented shock effects (Disney characters turning into smirking goblins; Abramsohn's son developing blacked-out eyes), all of which is still more preferable than when Moore begins tossing in random weirdness in the second half (a lusty mom who might be an actual witch; a techno-robot-conspiracy at work in the heart of Epcot Center; a fatal, highly contagious cat flu) that never makes any internal sense. By the end, it's almost as if Escape from Tomorrow has become a calculated attack against the consumerism and commodification that Disney itself perpetuates, and that's a far safer tack to take than to dissect the flaws inherent in the modern nuclear family. However, as a piece of guerrilla theater, Escape from Tomorrow remains a fascinating document.
In his Blu-ray review, Jeffrey Kauffman wrote that "There's a Freudian element to Escape from Tomorrow that plies Jim's uneasy psyche, especially with regard to his relationship with women. He continually argues with his wife, he obviously has eyes for the two young French girls, and in one of the film's most disturbing sequences, he ends up losing his daughter Sara. In one scene that may or may not be part of Jim's imagination, he has carnal relations with a mysterious woman who later plays a part in Sara's disappearance. Does any of this make 'sense' in any kind of traditional narrative way? Not really. Moore attempts to weave things together in a late gambit indicating Jim is a part of some super-secret conspiracy, but since even that may be part of the character's mental breakdown, ultimately there are no real answers, especially when things go from bad to worse and once again Elliott is caught closing a door, this time isolating a more seriously endangered Jim. While Escape from Tomorrow eludes any facile analysis, it's long on mood and especially a rather liberal dose of black humor. Any parent who has ever felt trapped in any magic kingdom will no doubt be sympathetic to Jim's growing consternation. Moore seems to suggest that there is no escape from the clutches of Disney and his ilk, which is certainly a more frightening prospect than any animated villain could create."