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Pieces of April
(2003)
Dir: Peter Hedges
This is essentially art-house tweak on rote Hallmark-channel fodder. It uses a rosy caricature of inner-city, ethnic joviality and a generally precious, sense of urban eccentricity to punctuate the unfolding of a heartbreakingly-urgent, Thanksgiving-Day family reunion; the art-house tweak being the brief inclusion of medicinal marijuana and music by The Magnetic Fields’, Stephen Merritt. April Burns (Katie Holmes) is a young refugee of suburbia, alt-ing it up in one of New York City’s seediest apartment buildings. She’s full of beans and bad attitude, sporting crimson highlights, a wealth of rubber wrist-bands, and a live-in boyfriend, Bobby (Lil’ Denzel: Derek Luke), but you just know that deep down, she‘s buried that heart of gold somewhere. This Thanksgiving, she is preparing for a visit from her estranged family. There is a huge rift, mostly between April and her terminally ill mother, that needs cinematic mending. The future balance of her family hangs in the success of April’s turkey dinner, and fuck-it-all if her pilot light doesn’t go out. Bobby is out running an “awwwww”-inspiring errand, so April, who has zero practical life skills (she can‘t even peel a potato with a potato-peeler), must rely on being strategically cute and pouty in her various attempts at cajoling her neighbors into letting her use their stoves to cook her bird. She wins the hearts of the sassy black couple downstairs and the timid Asian family one flight up. She also forges a humorous relationship with an extremely anal tenant and his pug, and gets snubbed by an even more anal vegan. Meanwhile, her big-hearted father (Oliver Platt), embittered mother (Patricia Clarkson), Alzheimer-ridden grandmother, sardonic brother and prissy sister make their moving, station-wagon journey into the city. Their back-roads excursion becomes an emotional expose that fills in the blanks as to why mom and big sis are at odds, and just how broken it has left the otherwise loving family. Do you think they make it? Pieces of April is predictably tense in all the right places, and numbingly saccharine everywhere else, and goddamned if it didn’t make me cry. You can only fight a movie this plucky and well-intended for so long. It’s like trying to hate koala bears. What are you, some kind of asshole? Towing the Gary Marshall handbook to the arena of hand-held DV melodrama, Pieces of April secures itself a slightly unwarranted level of immediacy, and floods the senses with sweetness. So it goes. Deep down, we all know that there is an innate goodness in every one of us, and when we need it most, the goodwill of others and the upward surge of humanity are there to crystallize the triumph of the human spirit. Hogwash. But whatever, I’d watch this movie again in a second. It is almost as great as Steel Magnolias. I’m serious.
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