Toronto Film Festival 2013: Labor Day, review Dir: Jason Reitman. Stars: Kate Winslet, Josh Brolin, Gattlin Griffith There's craft, care and sensitivity in every frame of Labor Day, so why does the movie feel so counterfeit? It's a puzzle. Writer-director Jason Reitman has form with a snarky teenage point of view in Juno, and a wearier adult one in Up in the Air - films whose common ground is perhaps their melting veneer of cynicism, with proudly exposed heart beneath. Here, adapting a 2009 novel by Joyce Maynard, he lapses instead into a sun-kissed emotional monotone, and more or less sets up camp. Dreamy sincerity is the effect he's going for, but there are only so many baseball games in magic-hour light, trailer-ready montages of cosy household ritual, and fragmentary flashbacks of one character's mysterious past a movie can peddle before you start to wonder if it's for real. We could talk about Kate Winslet, whose role as Adele, a depressed, divorced single mom in mid-1980s New Hampshire, is another finely played entry in her growing range of unhappy homemakers - the same catalogue with Little Children and Revolutionary Road on previous spreads. Josh Brolin's more than respectable as an escaped convict, Frank, who calmly but firmly demands Adele and her teenage son Henry (Gattlin Griffith) let him hide out in their delightfully appointed home, which does not look for one moment as though a depressed single mom has been keeping it in order. Frank, in what's initially meant to be a one-night stay, still finds plenty of handyman duties to let him flex his sizeable biceps around the place - fixing a loose floorboard here, a squeaky door there, indulging in a bit of shirtless ironing. And wait till you get a load of his peach pie. In the movie's blissed-out, inescapably ridiculous centrepiece, he teaches Adele and Henry how to stew a heap of ripe fruit and roll out pastry, with just the right amount of seasoning (a "salty crust" is crucial). When he guides Adele's hands onto the rolling pin, you expect Unchained Melody to pipe up at any moment. "Help me put a lid on this house," he tells them pointedly when the top's going on. Griffith is also very impressive. But it's strange how little their combined efforts actually help. The film's inches away from starring Zac Efron and Taylor Schilling: though pristinely faithful to Maynard's book, it blurs inexorably into Nicholas Sparks. Time for this trio is meant to stand still, and so it does - even Frank's first day establishing his perfect stepdad credentials is stretched out to feel like months. When the three decide to make a run for the Canadian border, they take half the movie to get their act together, and though the tension of their hoped-for escape briefly rouses us from a pudding-induced coma, it's too late.