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.
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