BEFORE: See, now, this is where I wanted my linking to lead me, to where I could watch "Labor Day" on Labor Day - how much more appropriate could this be? So far this year I managed to land "Finian's Rainbow" on St. Patrick's Day, "The Passion of the Christ" and "Risen" on Easter weekend, and "Mother's Day" on Mother's Day. I think I'm doing all right in 2017. If I can just hit Halloween with something appropriate and finish the year the way I want, I'll be satisfied. No Christmas movies this year, because no channel has run "Bad Santa 2" yet or "Office Christmas Party", and the plan's already in place to get me to the end of the year without leaving any spaces for those movies.
Thankfully, "Labor Day" is not a Garry Marshall-directed ensemble comedy with 20 different name actors in it. Clark Gregg carries over from "We Were Soldiers".
THE PLOT: A depressed single mom and her son offer a wounded man a ride. As police search town for the escaped convict, the mother and son gradually learn his true story as their options become increasingly limited.
AFTER: Clark Gregg plays the ex-husband here, and the father to the young central character who watches as his mother slowly falls for an escaped convict who's chosen their home to hide in on a long Labor Day weekend, as he waits for the trains to start running again so he can hop aboard and leave town. (Apparently he never saw the film "Into the Wild", train engineers don't like it when people jump on freight trains for free rides...)
As the weekend progresses, I wasn't sure if we were seeing a take on the Stockholm syndrome, where people under stress tend to have feelings for their captors - or if this convict was a genuinely good man, who didn't deserve to be in prison in the first place. This little fact, though important, is a mystery at first, but we do his life story unspool in flashbacks as the film goes on. No spoilers, but suffice it to say that we're dealing with people who are damaged in different ways, and the implication is that they could be the solution to each other's problems - or the convict could be manipulating the mother to get a ride out of town, it's impossible to be sure.
With the setting of a small Massachusetts town (Red Sox hats are everywhere) and the tension that gets created with a convict invading this family's home, I had to check twice to make sure that this wasn't based on a Stephen King story - it had that same kind of feel to it. The dramatic tension that Hitchcock achieved with visuals often comes through in a King story, but through wondering about people's intentions, or the impact of confinement in buildings ("Misery", "The Shining") on people who are close to the edge. I think if Stephen King ever set out to write a romance, it might come out something like this.
I was also reminded of those two escaped convicts in upstate New York, Richard Matt and David Sweat in 2015. This film was released in early 2014, with a similar storyline - one of those convicts was having a relationship with a woman who worked at the prison, who was supposed to pick them up in her car after they broke out, but she changed her mind at the last minute. After the news broke, people wondered how a prison inmate could be so charming to a married woman, to make her consider leaving her husband and driving off with him, but it could happen. And I remember everyone figured these two would make a run for the Canadian border, but me, I would have headed for Mexico - a lot further away, but nobody would be expecting it.
But back to the film - Frank, the convict, passes the time by doing odd jobs around the house, like changing the oil in the car or fixing that squeaky door - in just a couple of days, it's like he's lived there for years, even teaching young Henry how to hit a baseball. In a very short time, he takes over all the husbandly and fatherly duties, filling the gap caused by the absent ex-husband. Much can be drawn from the scene where he teaches mother and son how to make a peach pie, which is not the kind of thing you tend to learn in prison, so perhaps this is some remnant of his previous life? Discuss.
Labor Day is a strange holiday (we get the day off to celebrate hard work?) and some people use the long weekend to go on vacation, but others use it to get things done around the house - like changing the oil or baking a pie? Me, I got out in the backyard today and chopped down weeds for a couple of hours - the grapevine grows all spring and summer long, and by September it's spread new tendrils out into the neighbor's yard, and also up into their tree. If I don't cut it back, it will eventually kill that tree, so once the weather gets a little cooler, I've got to deal with it. Now I can watch those far-off leaves slowly whither and die over the fall, which means I've kept all the nearby vegetation alive for another year.
So in many ways, Labor Day is about endings, it's the ending of the summer season, and I've also managed to get to the end of several TV series in the past week - "American Gods", "Twin Peaks" and (very soon) "11.22.63". It's time to clear the DVRs and get ready for the new TV season, and I'm also only a few days away from the end of my September chain - next weekend I'll go on hiatus for about three weeks, and I'll be back on October 1. But before that, it's another mixed bag of films this week, most of them with Michael Stuhlbarg in them.
Also starring Kate Winslet (last seen in "Steve Jobs"), Josh Brolin (last seen in "Hail, Caesar!"), Gattlin Griffith, Tobey Maguire (last seen in "The Great Gatsby"), Tom Lipinski, Maika Monroe (last seen in "The 5th Wave"), Brooke Smith (last seen in "Interstellar"), Lucas Hedges (last seen in "Manchester By the Sea"), Micah Fowler, Alexie Gilmore, Brighid Fleming, with cameos from J.K. Simmons (last heard in "Zootopia"), James Van Der Beek.
RATING: 6 out of 10 Friendly's Fribbles
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