This is the last expected Jason Reitman film. After JUNO and YOUNG ADULT, this one is an adaptation of a summer romance in quiet suburbs in the US. Despite a nice reconstitution of the 80’s, the plot reveals several blunders from a director who usually likes to go beyond the appearances and the politically correct.
Indeed, it is quite disappointing to see that Jason Reitman accumulated disturbing summaries and clichés all along the movie. The actors are excellent, with a alchemy that saves the movie, whereas their characters are still very superficial or simply fall into too easy caricatures. Kate Winslet gives many emotions as a fragile and wounded woman, when her character does not hesitate a second to threat her life and her unique son’s following a fugitive (Jason Brolin). Meanwhile, this fugitive intrigues with his hardly believable ambiguity between the good daddy and the murderer. Finally, the promising actor, Gattlin Graffith, has to play the young adolescent completely passive keeping his dumbstruck eyes on a situation it’s hard to believe. Here is the issue; you notice the intentions of the director to explain such situations and the actors struggling against those contradictions with a very, not to say too much, academic scenes but quickly cliché.
Between the peach pie cooking in a
DIRTY DANCING style, the fantasy of the woman tied up by her gaoler and the symbiotic love of the son towards her mother, you quickly get a certainly very nice visual but which still does not avoid crippling foreshortening. With a very slow and contemplative rhythm, the heat of this long summer weekend weight upon the audience as the cruel lack of conflict. Everything is well executed but not so well brought up. There is no spice though so usual in Reitman’s style, no real drama and so, no real plot. Between the thriller and the emotion from those heart-breaking lives you are right to expect for this kind of movie, nothing comes out good neither in one way nor the other.
In this suburbs in the 80’s, the young man look on theses adults could have reminded you ET or the tragic couple in REVOLUTIONARY ROAD (performed also by Kate Winslet in duo with Leonardo DiCaprio) but stays far away from them.
Maybe it is the trap of the adaptation or a too new territory for Jason Reitman, but the performances of the actors cannot hide a story, which reveals too much inconsistency.
