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" The first thing that makes you want to see Jason Reitman&amp;#039;s drably titled Labor Day is that it was made by Jason Reitman. The second is the film&amp;#039;s exquisite, unexpected pairing of Josh Brolin and Kate Winslet as troubled, hard-luck lovers Frank and Adele. They look beautiful but lived-in\u2014my favorite kind of love match. They don&amp;#039;t just have good movie chemistry: It&amp;#039;s as if their DNA is intertwined for life and they&amp;#039;ve only now discovered that fact. That quality makes Labor Day a romance to root for\u2014although not an easy or predictable one.  Reitman is frequently praised for his comedy, but that admiration seems more aptly directed to his glorious ghost-busting father, Ivan. Although Jason shares his father&amp;#039;s comic gift, at their core his movies tend to dig deeper into the conundrum of how we live now: multimillion-dollar corruption in Congress (2005&amp;#039;s Thank You for Smoking), teenage pregnancy (2007&amp;#039;s Juno), and the human consequences of the Great Recession (2009&amp;#039;s Up in the Air). What&amp;#039;s particularly striking is the way Reitman, whatever his central focus is, weaves a thread of romance into every movie, not to warm things up so much as to watch them fail to pan out, or just get messy. One of the most shocking antilove scenes in any film plays out between George Clooney and Vera Farmiga toward the end of Up in the Air. You leave the theater feeling like you just barely dodged a bullet. Related: Mr. Right: Christopher Buckley, Hot on Politics  But Labor Day breaks this woeful mold. In Hollywood parlance, when you want the leads in your movie to fall for each other, you give them a bit of business that allows them to &amp;quot;meet cute.&amp;quot; I detest the term cute except when applied to babies or puppies. Frank and Adele do not meet cute\u2014they meet desperate. Frank is a convict on the run, and Adele has become a borderline agoraphobe who leaves her deteriorating semirural suburban house only to stock up on canned goods. Badly shaken by a painful divorce and another trauma that she keeps to herself, she wouldn&amp;#039;t make the trip at all if it weren&amp;#039;t for her son, Henry (an amazing Gattlin Griffith). Children see a lot more than grown-ups give them credit for, and by 13 they&amp;#039;ve got radar. Henry loves his mother, as well he might; after all, his father was willing to leave him, too. So it&amp;#039;s Henry who helps her drive into town, keeping her trembling hands as steady as possible, and it&amp;#039;s Henry who shows her that he&amp;#039;s outgrown his clothes and needs new ones before school starts. That&amp;#039;s what takes them to the local big box store, and as Henry chooses some clothes, so does Frank, chatting suddenly at his side, moving with him to Adele, pleading quietly for a ride out of town, just as she notices a wound oozing from his abdomen into his white T-shirt. Related: Movie Release: &amp;#039;Up in the Air&amp;#039;  This all takes place in a minute at most\u2014a fearsome but oddly graceful minuet. Reitman has said that the hardest question raised by the movie was why this woman would take in such a dangerous man. And why would Henry not stop her? But you understand, because he was courteous to Adele&amp;#039;s son, and to her, and when that brief ride ended he didn&amp;#039;t ask for more. But there was that wound, and, despite all that Adele can&amp;#039;t do for herself, she has the skill to treat and save him. Perhaps the two of them have this in common: They&amp;#039;re wounded human discards, and neither deserves to be. But there&amp;#039;s much more to the stories of these captivating people, one of whom remains a mystery while judicious flashbacks allow us to understand the other. Reitman is a master of storytelling, but his understanding of human nature is masterly too. Labor Day is based on Joyce Maynard&amp;#039;s 2009 novel of the same name; as soon as Reitman read it, he knew he would adapt it for a film. &amp;quot;I wanted to know why these broken people needed each other,&amp;quot; he said at the film&amp;#039;s Toronto International Film Festival premiere, &amp;quot;and slowly, the answer unveiled itself to me. I was overwhelmed. Parts of the book leveled me, and I cried.&amp;quot; "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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