Monday in September is Labor Day in the United States, and the movie is about five days of that. Adele, a single mother played by Kate, takes her seventh-grade son Henry to the supermarket and meets Frank, a fugitive who is seriously injured by Josh. As a result, after returning home, Adele became dependent on the fugitive and secretly fell in love, and as a child from the first perspective, he also found what his biological father did not give him in Frank.
This may seem like a story of a "Stockholm Syndrome" at first, but adding an unforgettable past relationship as a foreshadowing of the two protagonists makes it all less difficult to understand.
In a way, "Labor Day" can be seen as Kate's follow-up to "Revolutionary Road", with the same unhappy married life, the dead newborn baby (only the latter was Kate voluntarily abandoned) and Both Josh and Leonardo's characters happen to be named Frank in both films. The difference is probably the way that leads to the result. In "Labor Day", Kate takes love too seriously in her marriage, and even all she needs is to use love to fill her empty heart, as the film's ex-husband said: She was in love with love. In "Revolutionary Road", the marriage finally lost to reality.
Compared with Kate, the marital tragedy of the male protagonist is much simpler: betrayal or suspicion (in fact, I don't know if the male protagonist's ex-wife's infidelity is true, but it may not matter when she dies). With the dark and muffled background music, this relationship goes from beginning to end in fragmented memories. Like another short in the movie.
Watching "Labor Day" reminds me of another Japanese movie "The Wicked", not only the similarities in the plot, but also the interpretation of love has an amazing fit. It was also a failed love experience. The "wicked" husband and wife Megumi killed his ex-girlfriend. During the absconding, the husband and wife met Fukajin Eri, an employee of a clothing sales store. Perhaps moved by each other's sincerity, the two cherished each other and embarked on a journey together. the way to escape. However, in a famous family with complicated "good and evil" like Japan, such feelings seem to come more naturally than in "Labor Day".
But in "Labor Day", there is another catalyst that promotes the emotional development of the hero and heroine. It was better to say that Adele was in love with love than she was in love with sex, and Frank satisfied her.
In the end what kind of love is worth abandoning everything to pursue. Both films want to tell such a pure love, and the price is to give them all kinds of obstacles, the gap in the background seems to be inextricable from the past and the threat of the outside world. "The Wicked" gave us an even more heart-wrenching ending. The police finally found the husband and wife Mu Cong and Shenjin Eri, who had been together at the seaside lighthouse for several days. Ri's neck, making it mistaken for Fukatsu Eri to be kidnapped, and watching the person who was with him being taken away alone, love seemed to stop breathing at that moment.
"Labor Day" has a much milder ending in the same way. I thought the film would come to an end when Frank was captured, but the director didn't stop there and let Tobey Maguire make a cameo. He took a grown-up Henry, and let Adele and Frank meet again after 25 years, with a deep hug and the ending scene locked in the two walking hand in hand on a field path.
Later, I learned that "In the Clouds" and "Juno" are all from Jason Reitman, and it is not so abrupt to see such a healing ending.
The film takes the young Henry as the first point of view and records this story in 1987 with his eyes. However, I think it seems more suitable to narrate as an adult Henry. After "Titanic", Kate Winslet seems to be performing this type of sensitive and neurotic woman who seems fragile but has her own stubborn feelings. At the beginning of the film, Old Joe still had a killer expression, but Kate had already talked about his feelings, but in the film, he fully demonstrated the life skills of a good man, repairing cars, repairing stairs, repairing door panels, cooking and teaching children. Baseball to please a woman and even jumping off a building to escape is almost a shootout.
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