Review: Labor Day

City Paper grade: F

There are bad movies, and then there are movies like Labor Day. Originally scheduled for Paramount’s prime Christmas Day Oscar slot but scuttled to the January boneyard once people finally saw the foolish thing, this risible bit of Harlequin romance is one of the silliest films I have ever watched. It’s pompous, self-serious and inadvertently hilarious. Adapted from a novel by Joyce Maynard, Labor Day is the tale of escaped convict Frank Chambers (Josh Brolin), who bolts out a prison window during an emergency appendectomy and ends up spending a long weekend with a hotcha, anxiety-ridden single mom (Kate Winslet) and her impressionable adolescent son (Gattlin Griffith). Frank’s supposed to be holding them hostage, but it’s fifty shades of “hey” when he ties Winslet’s trembling yummy mummy to a kitchen chair, and the two are quickly making the beast with two backs — but not before Brolin has already fixed the stonework in her crumbling basement, cleaned the gutters, changed the oil in the family station wagon and taught her awkward son how to play baseball. The erotic centerpiece of this daft movie arrives when Brolin teaches Winslet and son how to bake a peach cobbler — a historically laughable sequence during which sexual innuendo is applied to fruit filling. This scene will be talked about for years, and should show at midnight every weekend alongside The Room.