Was Kate due a grounding after the awards extravaganza of Revolutionary Road and The Reader? Because Labor Day (12A) slipped into cinemas in March and slipped out again almost unnoticed. With the DVD release this is a good time to reappraise her contribution to a film that deserves to be seen. Directed by Jason Reitman, the man who made Juno, it is no soft-centred love story aimed at lonely middle-aged dreamers. It has a tension that burns.
Winslet plays the depressive mother of a 12-year-old boy, divorced after her worse half legged it with a lady down the road. She lives in a large, messy house in Massachusetts, surrounded by trees and the hint of wilder country beyond. One day at the supermarket a man approaches her son. He is injured and says he fell out of a window. He is new in town and has nowhere to go.
They take him in and he helps out around the house. Meanwhile, everyone’s talking about an escaped murderer in the neighbourhood and you think, hey, hang on, is this the guy?
Winslet transforms this emotionally wounded woman and gives her a voice. Josh Brolin, as the incomer, contributes a powerful commitment, tense but focused, like someone constantly on guard, and the boy (Gattlin Griffith) who relates the story is perfectly cast.
Extras consist of a commentary by the writer/director, the director of photography and the co-producer, as well as six deleted scenes, all of which are memorable. The commentary is informative, detailed and intelligent. Like the film, it never wastes your time.
Documentaries have captured the higher ground now that multiplexes feed off CGI in anything with a comic-book heritage.
Twenty Feet from Stardom (12A) stands proud at the pinnacle of achievement, a galaxy away from X-Men.
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