Screenwriter Peter Hedges is doing well: all four movies he has written so far were good or reasonably good. That’s a rarity. Usually an American screenwriter’s CV is composed in a ratio of, say, three (or more) bombs to one success. Hedges wrote the scripts for What’s Eating Gilbert Grape? (from his own novel), A Map of the World, and About a Boy. Now he has directed his first movie, Pieces of April — written, naturally, by himself.
What the above list shows is Hedges’s concern with familial bonds, and Pieces of April puts his spin on the traditional American theme of family reunion at Thanksgiving.
The movie is neatly contained within a single day. It starts with April (Katie Holmes), who’s a bit on the funky-punky side, being dragged out of bed by her boyfriend (Derek Luke) to start getting ready. In a gesture of reconciliation toward the family (particularly her mom, who regards her as a lost cause), she has invited them to leave the comfort of their suburban home and travel to her apartment in a less than salubrious part of New York for Thanksgiving dinner.
Clearly April is not going to find this easy. And her inexperience as a cook is not her only problem. The movie switches back and forth between her increasingly hilarious battle with the food itself and the tribulations of the family on the road. There’s dad Oliver Platt, mom Patricia Clarkson, brother John Gallagher Jnr, sister Allison Pill and slightly demented gran Alice Drummond. Gran is appropriately named Grandma Dottie, and the actor playing the younger sister is aptly surnamed Pill — she is indeed something of a pill. But best of all, and named with the darkest irony, is the mom — Joy.
Clarkson as Joy is the best thing in the movie, though the others give strong support. She is an ill woman, and she’s not going gently. Her faculties of vituperation are quite unimpaired. She is very funny indeed. Like Pill as the sister (and they make a very convincing mother-daughter team), the brilliant comedy here emerges from the character and her words rather than, as in April’s case, from the situations in which she finds herself.
The two modes work well together, and the movie as a whole is consistently amusing. Dealing with mounting food problems, April has to throw herself on the mercy of the other inhabitants of her apartment block — and an entertaining lot they turn out to be. This is situation comedy of a sophisticated kind, and it bounces well off the more verbal comedy of the family largely confined to their car.
Pieces of April looks like it was shot on video, which gives it much visual mobility as well as a rough-edged vérité. The apparently unstyled look grounds the comedy in what feels like a firm experiential reality, and that’s all to the good. It may well look better on television, and the ending is perhaps a little over-easy, but it works nonetheless.
Pieces of April is sparky and spiky and, like April’s eyes, a little black around the edges.