Pieces of April (2003)

Pieces of April is a neat little indie film from the early 2000s about a dysfunctional family brought together by the occurrence of Thanksgiving and a spot of life-ending cancer. April Burns is the estranged daughter who sends out the invitations for what could be their final holiday dinner together, and to throw an extra spice into the mix, it's also the first meeting with her mysterious boyfriend (he's black, but a slight upgrade on her previous drug-dealing partner. Go figure.). But director Peter Hedges arranges the structure of the movie so that these stories are all separate strands, and when they converge in the end, all past grievances have been aired and resolved. It is the journey there that tells the story; the reunion is just a formality. A young Katie Holmes plays the titular role, and looks the part (although she would be a complete anachronism today): heavy gothic eyeliner, dyed pigtails, a choker and an abundance of irreverence. But beneath that surface brews anxiety, and Holmes frets frequently and appropriately. Just look at her fall to pieces when stumbling across a pair of salt and pepper shakers along with the childhood trauma that accompanies them. She enables the grief to be visible. Her mother by comparison gets the meatier, Oscar-worthy opportunities, able to undercut her nastiness with biting humour. It's Patricia Clarkson's sheer dismissiveness of the situation that makes her such a potent personality; it's her last Thanksgiving, and she's getting as many late shots in as she can. The natural rhythms of the overlapping dialogue in and out of the car assist this aura of toxicity, riffing off each other, then cutting in during the middle of a sentence, bouncing punchlines off egos. Their timing is impeccable, like a comedy troupe in perfect sync. See how Alison Pill splutters a protest when her big-headed brother tries to snap a candid photo of her picking at her teeth, and then as Clarkson cuts in with a sarcasm comment. You can't buy that type of authenticity. Stylistically, Hedges makes the best of his shoestring budget, replacing conventional lighting and camera setups with a handheld grittiness, as if the viewer was a distant cousin awkwardly observing this family reunion like a fly on the wall. It's no Cassavetes, but it works well in stripping away the glamour of their fragmented lives, peering up and around the dinghy corners of April's apartment block. Livolsi cuts with scrappy relish, in one particular occasion overlaying April and Bobby's sweet pillow talk (about the lavish meal they are preparing) with the bickering and chaos of the rest of the Burns family making their way into the city. It's all grainy and the outdoor shots are overexposed, but those have never got in the way of a good story. April's quest to cook her damn turkey doubles as an expansion of her mindset and tolerance, sharing stories and cooking tips with black neighbours and overflowing with gratitude at the Chinese family who lend her the use of their oven, although they don't speak a lick of English. This is all pretty conventional stuff, and although it may be eye-opening for April, it's not exactly groundbreaking or transgressive. Even when Bobby is fretting over making a good impression on his white girlfriend's family, the subtext is mostly text. When he bumps into April's drug-dealing ex, instead of highlighting the irony of how race still is the overpowering stigma, it just becomes a bad comedy sketch. It all ends in a wordless montage set to gentle music and touching snippets of the reconciliation dinner, which is perhaps more than the Burns deserve. See Jonathan Demme's Rachel Getting Married for a similar story that doesn't pull its punches.

Family gatherings and the unpleasant things resulting therefrom are a common theme in cinema. "Pieces of April" features this theme but branches it out to also look at social isolation. April (Katie Holmes) has lived in this apartment in New York for some time but hasn't gotten to know the other people in the building. Upon finding her oven broken, April has no choice but to try and get to know people. Meanwhile, her family's conversations reveal old wounds.The movie is shot in a naturalistic style to give a sense of realism. And quite frankly, that's the only thing in April's dismal world (both from her residence and her family). All sorts of bad things are happening with each group (April, her beau, and her family). And the movie pulls off everything perfectly. This is exactly what a movie should be. I recommend it.Also starring Patricia Clarkson (who received an Academy Award nomination for the role), Oliver Platt, Alice Drummond (the librarian in the original "Ghostbusters"), Derek Luke and Sean Hayes.

Moving, funny, sad, and intensely humanAbout thirty minutes into this film, I must confess that I didn't think I was going to like it, but I ended up liking it a great deal. The first problem I had was the look of the film, with an exceptionally grainy cast to the images, made worse by a series of extreme close ups, and bleached out colors. The film never ended up looking good, but the it bothered me less as it went on. The second thing that bothered me was that the set up seemed a bit too stereotypical: black sheep of the family April living in squalor in another town (New York City) makes a Thanksgiving dinner for her disapproving family (loving but sometimes overwhelmed father, younger and negativistic sister, go-with-the-flow younger brother, grandmother suffering from Alzheimer's, and hypercritical, cold, and unloving mother, who is undergoing--probably futility--chemotherapy for breast cancer). Of course, everything starts going wrong and gets worse (April and her boyfriend obviously have no culinary skills, oven is broken and she has extreme difficulty finding anyone who can help her, her mother in the car bringing her family to NYC is constantly berating April and creating a poisoned atmosphere, etc.), and I felt the whole thing was a bit too predictable (which it in part remained). But at some point about halfway through the film, I really started enjoying the film. Sure, it still looked bad, but I started enjoying getting to know the characters, I began to find the humor more and more biting, and I started to want her family to be pleasantly surprised at April's almost heroic efforts to create perhaps the last good day they would all have as a family. I was also enjoying some of the quirky neighbors we meet, including a very helpful middle-aged African American couple living below her, and a bizarre upstairs neighbor with a nice, new stove (played by Sean Hayes of WILL AND GRACE). Things both at April's apartment, with her boyfriend (who unhappily runs into her drug dealer ex-boyfriend just before the dinner starts), and inside the car get worse and worse until everything apparently collapses. And then, perhaps a bit too neatly, everything is put back together again. But just like the characters in the film, we in the end want everything to be nice and pleasant, and it isn't at all hard acceding to that inclination.I liked the cast a great deal. Oliver Platt (he and NOT Will Ferrell should be starring in A CONFEDERACY OF DUNCES!) is as excellent as always, and Patricia Clarkson is outstanding as April's dying and acerbic mother. She is especially funny in the scene where she smokes dope (to counteract the effects of the chemo) and seems to rewind to her youth in the car. Katie Holmes is made to be as unlovely as it is possible to make her, but she still possesses enough wounded charm to make us root for her making her dinner a success. Indeed, her ongoing struggles both against fate and against her own culinary ineptness renders her as quite the heroine by the end of the film.This film isn't for everyone. It is a bit bleak, and it isn't the prettiest film in the world to look at, and fans of DAWSON'S CREEK might want to see a prettier Katie Holmes, but if one can get past all this, one just might discover that this is a funny, inspiring, and moving film.

Most people, when they read "family drama", they run. Don't. "Pieces of April" is different. It is keeps you involved and affected, but without any of the blatant good intentions that usually make this kind of movie so hard to watch. What is more, Katie Holmes is a far better actress then you would expect from her tabloid pedigree. Her portrayal of the prodigal daughter attempting reconciliation with her family is as touching as it is funny. April has invited her family to her ramshackle New York apartment for Thanksgiving. The script goes back and forth between April's place (where she has a very hard time preparing a proper Thanksgiving dinner) and her family's road trip (who are fighting and doom-saying all the way to April's doorstep). Disaster is in the air. Fine performance by Oliver Platt as April's father. Magnificent soundtrack by Steve Merritt of The Magnetic Fields.