This bit of news sort of caught me off guard as I didn’t know Jason Reitman (Juno, Up In the Air) was even planning another film. Traditionally he seems to wait until he’s done marketing his latest and then begins movement on a new project, but I guess he must be pretty much done with Young Adult and since Paramount is yet to set a release date Reitman must be looking for things to do.
Yesterday the Hollywood Reporter brought word Kate Winslet and Josh Brolin have commit to star in Reitman’s Labor Day, an adaptation of the Joyce Maynard novel in which Winslet will play a single mother of an awkward and isolated young son who takes in a stranger (Brolin). This stranger turns out to be an escaped convict and ends up teaching the boy life lessons, while she falls in love with him over the course of Labor Day Weekend.
However, while Reitman is lining up the project now, it’s not set to begin filming until some time next year, which tells me big things are in the plans for an Oscar push for Young Adult, which reteams Reitman with his Oscar-winning Juno screenwriter, Diablo Cody, and features Charlize Theron as Mavis Gary, a writer of teen literature who returns to her small hometown to relive her glory days and attempt to reclaim her happily married high school sweetheart (Patrick Wilson). When returning home proves more difficult than she thought, Mavis forms an unusual bond with a former classmate (Patton Oswalt) who hasn’t quite gotten over high school either.
As I said, Young Adult doesn’t yet have a release date and it’ll be curious to see how Paramount handles its roll out. In 2009 they debuted Up In the Air to great acclaim at Telluride, but the film ran out of steam by the time the Oscars rolled around. My guess is they will hold on to it for a little while longer this time, perhaps even a Toronto or Venice debut will be out of the question. We’ll just have to wait and see.
Before Winslet begins work on Labor Day she will have a pair of films in theaters, both potential Oscar contenders, in Roman Polanski’s Carnage and Steven Soderbergh’s viral thriller Contagion. Brolin will have nothing in theaters, but a pair of flicks in the can starting with Men in Black III and the far more highly anticipated Gangster Squad with Ruben Fleischer.
