Labor Day is the wonderful holiday weekend we enjoy off of school, which for this year happens to land on a Monday in September. In terms of entertainment, it is now represented in a movie that is hopelessly bad. A love that blooms from a man escaping from jail by jumping from a second story hospital window then taking a woman and her son hostage, becoming a very unusual father figure for the duration of the Labor Day weekend.
The woman, a recluse, and the son just trying to care for his mother both lack a man in charge of the house and are presented with a rare opportunity to have one forced upon them. The shared and often suggestive moments between the mother, Adele, and the convict, Frank were honestly uncomfortable and awkward considering the man had just escaped jail from an 18 year sentence for committing murder. But hey, love is blind, right?
He taught the kid, Henry, how to throw a baseball and, wow, he even baked them this great peach pie and fixed stuff around the house! Great guy! Problem is, murder is murder even if it was an accident. Kidnapping is also a crime, and people do, on occasion, become sympathetic or develop warm feeling towards their captor. It is a diagnosis. Stockholm syndrome can be a form of traumatic bonding where one becomes attached to a person that threatens or intimidates them, which occurs in the movie. Falling in love with Frank was Adele’s way of dealing with trauma.
Now this may seem bad, but then we get strange flashbacks throughout the movie, only learning near the end that the flashbacks are the true story of why Frank murdered his wife. In a sad twist of fate, his cheating wife was killed by his accidental shove and his young baby killed in a careless accident where the child was left in a bathtub of running water. It happened on the same day. While that’s sad, depressing, even tear worthy, it only gets worse. Poor Adele’s back story involves three miscarriages, all with her memory of each one as it happened, and finally a stillborn baby girl.
James gets captured and sent back to jail and charged with kidnapping. The ending of this movie nearly made me gag at how utterly perfect it was. Henry played baseball in high school then opened up a sucessful bakery with, you guessed it, famous peach pie. Frank was released from jail and went to live with Adele for the rest of their natural lives, the end. Really? All of that depressing stuff and they ended with a perfectly happy ending that made me wish I had left the movie early.
The sadness and bad ending were only some of the worst points. This movie was based off of a book “Labor Day” by Joyce Maynard, which I have yet to read and frankly do not wish to, seeing as the book will probably do me no more good than the movie. This was technically a love story under the worst circumstances, but spare yourself the sadness if you want a movie to see for Valentines Day. If you would like to sob halfway through then leave with a sick feeling in your stomach, feel free to see this movie. Otherwise, I don’t recommend it.
1/5 Stars
