Dir. Peter Hedges, 2003, US, 81 mins
Cast:
Katie Holmes, Patricia Clarkson, Oliver Platt, Derek Luke, Sean Hayes
For those of you who feel you're a bit of an expert on American independent cinema, please stifle your groan at yet another film centred around that great tradition of Thanksgiving. From Hannah and Her Sisters through to The Ice Storm, the dysfunctional family festive gathering has proved a rather popular story for filmmakers. But please rest assured: this film is really quite good.
It's funny, it's moving, it's quite cathartic for anyone who's experienced the darker side of the mother-daughter relationship, and it features Katie Holmes as the eponymous April, continuing her coming of age post- Dawson's Creek. April is trying to make Thanksgiving dinner for her family, but from the moment she tries to put the turkey in the oven, we can see it's not going to go well. She's living in a New York apartment block of the shabbiest kind and living independently; something of a shock to her family. No one, from her acerbic mother and doormat father to her younger siblings - a pothead photographer brother and goody-goody sister - thinks she's up to much. A dotty grandmother completes the line-up of this motley crew making its way from Pennsylvania to New York, and a long overdue family reunion. The added twist is that Joy, April's mum, is dying of cancer so feelings are running high all round, with sudden outbursts and portentous pauses. Cue a long and bickering car journey countered with April's increasingly desperate labours to prepare a traditional turkey dinner for her family and new boyfriend.
It's the play between these characters that really makes the film, writer-director Peter Hedges' directorial debut. A 'failed' actor himself (his own words) and also writer of What's Eating Gilbert Grape? he felt himself in a perfect position to handle this emotionally charged group of characters, and he is. Each character is beautifully complex, such as Platt's sensitive performance as April's father, reluctant to dismiss her efforts completely but lacking the strength to put forth his argument and upset his terminally ill wife.
Central to the film is the relationship between April and her mother. In trying to explain the cause of their, um, difficult relationship to her almost unbelievably loving and patient boyfriend (a solid performance from Derek Luke) April describes herself as the first pancake - the one that is normally thrown away. It certainly seems that her mother resents her presence for some reason and this knowledge has informed her behaviour from childhood through to a frankly troubled adolescence: sex, drugs, dodgy boyfriends, you name it, it seems April's done it, which would in turn explain her family's reluctance to embrace this 'new' April. Her mother Joy is also a rebel, and we are invited to draw the comparisons between the two women. She revels in winding up her caring husband and her highly strung daughter Beth, who are constantly tip-toeing around her, choosing instead to favour Timmy - smoking joints with him and getting him to take photographs of her post-operative scars. Patricia Clarkson is vibrant and cutting as Joy, piercing straight to the heart of the character's wry view of life, and thoroughly deserves her Oscar nomination.
The balance of the characters is so rich that it allows for a subplot that plays with stereotypes: April's black boyfriend leaves her to cook, in order to do "this thing I have to do" and whizzes around a practically deserted New York on his electric scooter, constantly running into street types who tell him that, "Tyrone is looking for him". It sets up a fantastically engineered denouement that completely turns the family's and our normal assumptions of another lowlife gangland boyfriend on their head. Then there are the cameos, including a blackly comic if slightly theatrical turn from Sean Hayes (of Will and Grace fame) as one of April's neighbours, on whom she calls for help.
Shot on DV format over 16 days, for a fraction of the budget it started life with, Pieces of April has a grainy, over-exposed look, its limited palette something very like a 1970s American independent film. It picks up the contrast of a shabby New York neighbourhood with the resplendent shades of an East Coast autumn, and is a beautiful example of how to make a feature of limitation thanks to Tami Reiker's cinematography.
Events spiral to what seems an inevitable conclusion - the meal looks like it will be a complete disaster, the in-car bickering escalates to the point where it seems unlikely they'll even make it to the apartment, and all the while Bobby has not returned - but are pulled back at the last moment into an unashamedly cheesy ending. Without giving too much away, the film ends with a series of photographs, presumably taken by April's brother. On one level it's a typical, Americanized resolution to what until then was an intelligent look at a dysfunctional family. On another, however, it's an understated final statement: no words, no movie, no lasting solutions or epilogue, just snapshots of moments in time, which in a way, is all a film can offer - right?
Kerry McLeod
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