Give Thanks
Pieces of April, made by playwright-turned-novelist-turned-screenwriter-turned-director Peter Hedges, could be confused for a reel compiling someone’s home movies. Shot on digital video using ambient light, it looks like something assembled by a film student for a final and lost soon after. It begins and then barely ends, and what’s in between is less a story than a collection of dropped clues about who these people are, what they want and where, aside from the obvious destination of a Thanksgiving dinner no one really wants to attend, they’re headed.
The cynic could easily disregard the pieces, which depict a dysfunctional family, the scorn of a dying mother and an apartment building populated by archetypes. Home for the Holidays, The Myth of Fingerprints or even Planes, Trains & Automobiles, with their blending of the wacky and the weepy, might be considered precursors to Pieces of April. Katie Holmes, as April, is no stranger to this subgenre, having appeared in Ang Lee’s The Ice Storm, the chilliest Thanksgiving movie ever made.
A dying mother’s unwilling trek from the suburbs to Manhattan to see her estranged daughter one last time is the kind of story Hedges, author of What’s Eating Gilbert Grape? and adapter of About a Boy, tells almost better than anyone in movies today. Still, what makes Pieces of April work is its vérité style, the way everything we see feels raw and genuine.
We’re never told why April and her mother, the ironically named Joy (Patricia Clarkson), do not speak; we know only that Joy favors her other daughter, Beth (Alison Pill). It’s all husband Jim (Oliver Platt) can do to convince Joy, made bitter and heartless by her breast cancer, to see April at all. Clarkson renders Joy’s pent-up rage at her daughter and her own betraying body so authentic that it’s all we can do to remind ourselves this is make-believe.
April craves closure of some kind but will settle for a civilized meal. But the fates have conspired against April and boyfriend Bobby (Antwone Fisher‘s Derek Luke). Her oven doesn’t work, forcing her to beg her neighbors to let her use theirs on the busiest cooking day of the year. The movie edges toward slapstick here, with April hauling a turkey up and down the stairs. Her saviors are a kindly black couple, a cutesy Chinese family and Will & Grace‘s Sean Hayes as a stuffy creep who expects a little sumpin-sumpin in return for use of his fancy oven. They’re all characters seeking their own spin-off series.
Hedges isn’t interested in the Big Epiphany or the Heartbreaking Reconciliation (though he ultimately finds it too irresistible to avoid). Like Robert Benton or Hal Ashby, he merely wrings big laughs and small sobs out of trivial and familiar tensions. It feels like the real thing, which is a trick few writers can muster and even fewer directors can master.
