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PIECES
OF APRIL
6/10
USA
2003 : Peter HEDGES : 81 mins
In her early
twenties, rebellious April Burns (Katie Holmes) has tired of feuding with
her relatives and is happily living in a tiny Manhattan flat with boyfriend
Bobby (Derek Luke). But when her mother Joy's (Patricia Clarkson) cancer
reaches a terminal stage, it's decided that the family should eat Thanksgiving
dinner together - at April's place. While April struggles with the turkey
- and an unhelpful gas oven - her family drive down from upstate New York:
Joy (Patricia Clarkson), April's father Jim (Oliver Platt) brattish younger
siblings Beth (Alison Pill) and Timmy (John Gallagher, Jr.) and Alzheimer's-suffering
grandmother (Alice Drummond). While Bobby scoures the city for a decent
suit, April seeks assistance from the apartment-block neighbours she has
seldom spoken to before. Problems ensue...
'Thanksgiving
trauma' is a favourite theme of American independent film-makers, although
the genre's most original recent entry was made (in California) by a couple
of Frenchmen: Jean-Baptiste Andrea and Fabrice Canepa's horror B-movie
Dead End featured
the most believably vicious of in-car family frictions. The Burns family
does grate on each others' nerves in Pieces of April, but with
less gory results than experienced by the hapless Dead Enders.
Geographically and thematically, Hedges covers territory much closer to
that mapped by Gregory Mottola in his 1996 indie-comedy The
Daytrippers.
In that movie,
thirtyish housewife Hope Davis travelled in a crowded car with her family
from upstate New York to Manhattan, after stumbling across evidence of
husband Stanley Tucci's infidelity. Despite much hype hailing Mottola
as the Next Big Thing, he was barely heard of again: not such a great
loss, as The Daytrippers was really a bumpily uneven ride, with
a particularly flat climax. Dead End is an even more drastic example
of the wheels falling off the wagon late on, the unforgiveably weak finale
largely undoing the bracing darkness of the early and middle stretches.
Pieces
of April plots a different trajectory: after an unpromising deja-vu
opening, and some so-so middle sections (Bobby's "adventures",
April's entanglements with oddball neighbours), Hedges builds to a surprisingly
moving resolution in which Joy and April wordlessly settle their long-standing
differences and the real meaning of Thanksgiving is asserted: both developments
carried off without an excess of mawkis sentimentality.
If Pieces
of April is ultimately more satisfying than either The Daytrippers
or Dead End, perhaps that's due to Hedges' greater wealth of
experience. Though this is his debut as a director, he's already in his
early forties and wrote What's Eating Gilbert Grape? (1993, based
on his own novel), A Map of the World (1999) and About A Boy
(2002), which earned Hedges an Oscar nomination. Pieces of April
also attracted Academy attention, with a 'surprise' Best Supporting
Actress nod for Patricia Clarkson.
Observers
weren't surprised that Clarkson was nominated per se - many thought she
should already have been recognised for the likes of High Art (1998)
and Far From Heaven.
The general consensus was that, if Clarkson was going to be nominated
for a 2003 movie, it would be for The
Station Agent, as Pieces of April might be 'too underground'
for Academy tastes. Shot (by cinematographer Tami Reiker) on lo-fi DV
and thus recognisably from the same InDigEnt production stable responsible
for Tadpole, Pieces
of April does have a rough, hand-held look. But - as with the central
characters of Joy and April - the film's gritty exterior is really a thin
shell yielding a relatively soft, conventional, amiable centre, with a
typically polished (if bafflingly under-used) soundtrack of songs by Stephin
'Magnetic Fields' Merritt.
But what did
happen to Greg Mottola? Since The Daytrippers his sole behind-the-camera
credits are for small-screen work, but he has appeared in a couple
of prominent films. Woody Allen, no less, cast him as a hotshot young
director in 1998's Celebrity. Four years later, Allen called on
him again to act in Hollywood Ending - this time Mottola was relegated
to playing 'Assistant Director.' If deliberate, this must count as the
most darkly witty thing Allen has done in years: more amusing, in fact,
than anything in The Daytrippers - or Pieces of April, come
to that.
8th July,
2004
(seen 29th June : UCI MetroCentre, Gateshead : public show)
by Neil
Young
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