Half-baked, or actually not even

A man doing 18 years for murder escapes during a hospital visit and holes up in the semi-rural home of a paralyzingly depressed divorcée and her sensitive and impressionable pubescent boy. The escapee is tough but tender, a sort of ideal man, really, one whose very position as the subject of a manhunt radiates danger without exuding any real threat. He ties the divorcée up just right; he fixes the furnace and tunes up the station wagon; he cleans the floor, gets rid of the squeak in the screen door hinges, and makes hearty chilli and mouth-watering cobbler. He says he didn’t kill anyone on purpose, and why shouldn’t the divorcée believe him? He’s so nice. And patient. And intuitive. And strong. (He’s Josh Brolin!) And anyway the divorcée needs a man’s love and attention. She’s fragile, wiggy, actually, but super-desirable. (She’s Kate Winslet!) The boy is drawn to the escapee and gets loving baseball tips from him. But he’s also jealous maybe, especially once he kens onto the heat rising between the escapee and his mom—this is, after all, a boy who gives his mother a “Husband-for-a-Day” coupon book for back-rubs and breakfast in bed. A key scene has all six of these characters’ hands plunged in a bowl, fondling ripe, sticky peaches in a kind of familial food-porn orgy. As with so much about this movie, a little light perversion goes a long way.

Labor Day is a brooding coming-of-age story and the fairly chaste tale of a heady long weekend-long romance. Directed by Jason Reitman (Juno, Up in the Air), it takes itself very, very seriously, though if, for example, you just remove the hushed, portentous scoring from that first scene where Brolin makes his weirdo entrance, bleeding, furtive, politely asking the boy to help him discreetly exit a department store, the whole thing would easily play as comedy. (Cyrus, maybe?) Screwball comedy? (Cary Grant: “I’m sorry, my dear, but I just can’t seem to shake these policemen.”) Or as Harlequin romance (obviously). Or as red-meat noir. Any of these would have made the film’s story, taken from the Joyce Maynard novel, a little easier to swallow. From the very notion of Winslet’s financially strapped shut-in and devoted mother trusting this guy enough to dump everything and leave the country with him and her son, to the escapee’s complete lack of any alarming, even normal-alarming, qualities, to the pretty pastoral flashbacks to young love and heartbreak, to the numerous shamelessly artificial obstacles that accumulate as the movie enters its third act (the nosy cop, the nosy ex, the nosy bank teller, the nosy, intrusive neighbour with the handicapped son who nearly spills the beans), pretty much everything in Labor Day is utterly preposterous. Brolin and Winslet (both of them actors I love), and even Gattlin Griffith, who plays the boy, each go the extra limit to dignify these characters and make them plausible. But that might be the problem (along with the spells of PBS classical guitar that accompanies scenes of secret fleeting carbohydrate-stoned domestic bliss). It’s certainly what makes Labor Day so laughable. It’s just impossible to take this stuff seriously. Though who knows? Maybe you’ll swoon in spite of yourself. Especially if you get hot and bothered over manly men baking. 

                      

Thank you, Kunio Kato

The major highlight of last night's 81st Oscars, certainly the most impressive acceptance speech in any case, came from Japanese filmmaker Kunio Kato, who took the award for Best Animated Short for 'La Maison en Petits Cubes.' Future winners may want to accept some coaching from this guy. With great concision and deadpan delivery the man managed to invoke the spirit of Styx at their most pop-savvy and thank an inanimate object, which in itself much surely constitute some sort of precedent. "Thank you, my pencil... Thank you, animation... Domo arigato, Mister Roboto..." So much more charming than the weirdly superior-sounding A.R. Rahman, who won in both the Song and Score categories and talked about how all his life he chose love over hate. I mean, what the hell does that mean?   

Anyway, considering the frustrating number of overt snubs and the ratio of genuine excellence to blandness that clogged the nominees this year, I unreservedly applaud this renovated approach to the acting categories that has five past winners come on stage and introduce each of the nominees personally, bestowing equal attention on all and taking undue emphasis away from the winner (the selection of which does so often feel like the result of a popularity contest even when the nominations sometimes convey a greater sense of adventure and observational powers on the part of the academy). Having the quintet of warm assessors play their parts made these individual moments feel far more intimate and less catty. They imparted (like Penelope Cruz's gorgeous 60-year-old gown and her heartfelt nod to Pedro Almodóvar's role in her career development) a deeper sense of tradition, and made more transparent the essence of what these awards are, or at least should be, really about, which is peer acknowledgment, a sense of community, and a love of the art. The results were far more moving than is normally the case. And Whoopi Goldberg was actually really funny! 

Of course we didn't get to see Werner Herzog win an Oscar, but I certainly can't complain about Man on Wire's taking Best Documentary or Philippe Petit's hugely enjoyable showing off. And even if I didn't feel that either The Reader or Slumdog Millionaire represented their best work, it was actually satisfying to see Kate Winslet and Anthony Dod Mantle get justly rewarded. All in all, it made the twenty minutes I spent fiddling with my rabbit ears more than worth the effort. 

Road to nowhere

April thought she and Frank must be extraordinary, that they would surely lead extraordinary lives, but then April got pregnant, Frank took an office job, and they bought themselves a house deep in the suburbs, where a second child emerged as alarmingly as the first. Before you know it, it’s 1955, and Frank’s 30. He’s having a liquid lunch, commiserating with some seducable innocent from the secretarial pool over how he found himself embedded in such mediocrity. He comes home on his birthday, and April, as though under some intoxicating spell, tells him they’re going to sell the house and car. They’re going to go to Paris, that place that so dazzled Frank when he passed through during the war. There’s still time for them to be extraordinary.

But of course, there isn’t. Happiness and fulfillment are less than fleeting in Revolutionary Road. They’re abstractions, something we never catch glimpse of, even in traces. The first three minutes of the movie sweep us from April and Frank’s first encounter to bracingly resentful, belligerent arguments on the side of the freeway. We start in neatly designed domestic despair and pretty much stay there, which is to say that director Sam Mendes’ latest film, an adaptation of Richard Yates’ 1961 eponymous novel, stuck with theatrical, histrionic, dated sounding talk—the script’s by Justin Haythe—makes a companion to Mendes’ breakthrough, American Beauty, which was also rife with neatly designed domestic despair, yet offered flashes of revelation. Even in the crucial scene in which April and Frank resolve to start anew in Europe, there isn’t a single flashing moment of revelation here, no dreamy thrill or sense of connection between them. Nor is there any such moment when they inevitably decide not to go, no relief or resignation, no mourning for opportunities lost or delayed. These scenes, rendered at times in handsome close-ups that do little to help the dearth of chemistry, just die up there on the screen, as the movie slowly sucks the life out of us all.

What is genuinely extraordinary in Revolutionary Road is Kate Winslet’s performance, newly crowned with a Golden Globe. Her April wanted to be an actor, and there she is, acting up a storm every day of her drab life, folding napkins, making supper, cleaning the drapes, playing the role of dutiful wife. Winslet keeps a current of electricity flowing through her better scenes. She’s almost scary, sad, yet sexy, in the one where she’s abandoned at a roadhouse with a fawning neighbour. She gets drunk, and, overwhelmed with angst, looks up at him and suddenly, with a comically grave expression, says, “Come on, let’s do it.” When she's later pinned by this neighbour in the front seat of a car, the way she holds her body rigid is itself interesting and unnerving to watch. April has sex twice in this film, each time lasting all of 30 seconds, and the disappointment registers on Winslet's face in an odd way that keeps you watching and wondering about what exactly is building up inside of her, rather than having her inner landscape all splayed out to mourn over. Before we reach the hysterical climax, Winslet's is a harrowing presence.

Fine actor though he is, Leonardo DiCaprio by contrast gives one of his most fraught performances. His Frank is basically an average guy in way over his head. He's no match for April in more ways than one. There’s a brilliantly gauged scene where Frank meets with a potential new employer for lunch, and DiCaprio’s pent-up frustration, that tension held in his jaw and forehead, makes it all too clear how Frank, for all his talk about his lousy job, realizes that he might be really good at it. And that he kinda likes that. And that maybe that's right where he belongs. Just about everywhere else in Revolutionary Road however, DiCaprio squints, gesticulates and shouts to excess, unable to spend a single moment on screen with a neutral expression. A moment of repose could tell us so much here, letting us catch the character off guard instead of bracing vaguely for a new attack. So DiCaprio flails in uncertainty, yet I can’t completely hold it against him. The material, which indeed devastates, presses too tightly up against the actors, positively stifling them. And Mendes’ approach seems so decided from the start, so obviously superior to the milieu depicted. So in the end I suppose DiCaprio’s rather like Frank: he simply never had a chance.