REVIEW: LABOR DAY (dir. Reitman)

From my Gaurdian review:—

'No actress of modern times has subjected matrimony to more vigorous onscreen interrogation than Kate Winslet. What began in a fit of melodrama, with Winslet threatening to throw herself from the aft of the Titanic rather than face loveless marriage to caddish Billy Zane, has turned into a series of fine-grained portraits — in Little children, Revolutionary Road, Mildred Pierce — of suburban drudges, marooned in their marriages, doomed by their intelligence, staring at the dust motes. Her happy marriage to Alan Rickman at end of Sense & Sensibility is beginning to look like the joker in the pack. Winslet’s early performances fizzed like firecrackers, giddy with their own freedom, but now she dulls her own innate brightness to play American Madame Bovaries—then setting something loose in their breast and watching them come to life. She liberates domestic prisoners. Generally, the liberation is invariably more compelling, more believable, than the imprisonment. Winslet is a child of the bohemian seventies, and the freedoms she naturally enjoys as an actress — her behavioral and gestural laissez-faire — can lend an edge of well-intentioned superiority to her inquiries: she gives the impression of listening to the women of the previous generation until the point where they say they felt imprisoned and then tuning out, her indignation stoked. It’s all she needs to know. Her recent performance as Mildred Pierce seemed to proceed from the top down, from a perch of well-intentioned pity.'