It’s been established for several years that it’s not healthy to inhale all the hype that blows out of Utah during its annual Sundance Film Festival. Movie-goers got a real inkling of that after The Spitfire Grill, the darling of the 1996 gathering, proved to be much ado about very little; studio heads even woke up to this reality after Miramax paid $10 million to acquire the insufferable Happy, Texas in 1999 and then watched it fail to even crack the two million dollar mark at the box office.
So the fact that Pieces of April rode the back of reams of positive buzz to emerge as one of the most costly acquisitions at last January’s event (United Artists dropped three-and-a-half mil just for the right to release it) doesn’t really prove anything… except the fact that this time around, the festival folks got it right.
Perhaps not the fest’s most tear-jerking picture (not with Whale Rider in the lineup), Pieces of April nevertheless pulls off a nice balancing act between humor and heartbreak as it makes its way toward a deeply satisfying finale. Set on the most American of holidays, the movie sits back and watches as April Burns (Katie Holmes) does her best to prepare a Thanksgiving dinner for her family — a family that might not even bother showing up. After all, April is the wayward daughter, the rebellious outsider who, we’re to assume, long ago gave up trying to please the other members of her family. Now living with her boyfriend Bobby (Derek Luke) in a Lower East Side apartment, April has decided to invite everybody to her place for a holiday feast — and, more significantly, for an opportunity to make peace with her estranged flesh and blood. But the day gets off to a disastrous start once April discovers that her oven isn’t working; frantic, she goes knocking door to door, anxiously seeking a fellow tenant who will be kind enough to offer her emergency use of their oven to cook the big bird.
April’s family, meanwhile, is experiencing its own meltdown during the car trip to the big city. Her bitter mother Joy (Patricia Clarkson), who’s long been diagnosed with cancer and knows that this might be her last Thanksgiving, feels she doesn’t have enough strength to even meet with her disappointment of a daughter, much less make up with her. April’s dad Jim (Oliver Platt) is a mountain of patience and reason, but he has trouble standing up to his domineering wife, largely because her frail condition makes him both guilty and frightened. Her sister Beth (the appropriately named Alison Pill) is beyond obnoxious, constantly pointing out April’s faults while trumpeting her own achievements. And her brother Timmy (John Gallagher Jr.) appears to be as gentle as his dad, but his stoner status means nobody takes his opinions seriously. There’s also a grandmother (Alice Drummond), but she’s only there to periodically stir out of her Alzheimer’s fog long enough to utter a wisecrack or a nugget of wisdom (this character could easily have been excised from the completed picture).
The movie hip-hops between April’s holy quest for a working oven and the Burns’ road trip of revelation, and it’s a credit to writer-director Peter Hedges (the About A Boy scripter is making his directorial debut with this one) that our interest never flags for either narrative thread. The car trip provides Clarkson (Julianne Moore’s best friend in Far From Heaven) plenty of opportunities to strut her stuff as a dying woman who feels that the most effective way for her to spit in the eye of her diagnosis is to do likewise to those who love her. And the interludes with April and her assorted neighbors — including a happily married black couple (Lillias White and Isiah Whitlock Jr.), a prissy bachelor (Will & Grace‘s Sean Hayes), and a family of Chinese immigrants — are the ones that best convey the spirit of the holiday being celebrated. A minor plot thread, concerning boyfriend Bobby’s efforts to procure nice threads for the occasion, is awkwardly handled, yet it allows Luke, the talented star of Antwone Fisher, to prove that he’s no mere flash in the pan.
As for Dawson’s Creek star Katie Holmes, she’s having a screen career that other TV starlets can only dream about — with such titles as The Ice Storm, Wonder Boys and now Pieces of April under her belt, she’s leaving the Sarah Michelles and Jennifer Loves far behind. Still, as much as she invests in the part of April, it’s hard to fully accept her as a rebellious punker who spent her entire childhood giving her mother grief — Holmes projects more of the fawnlike demeanor of a little girl lost than someone with a harsh edge. Yet when her big emotional moment comes, she’s up to the task, and the picture builds on that point to provide an ending that may be prove to be as cathartic for some audience members as it is for the characters. Clearly, Pieces of April earns its tears.
This article appears in Nov 5-11, 2003.
