One of the best reasons to go to the movies these days is Patricia Clarkson, who delivers a stunning performance in "The Station Agent," currently in theaters, and is the funny, spiky, salty center of "Pieces of April," opening today. The directorial debut of writer Peter Hedges ("What's Eating Gilbert Grape?," "About a Boy") may nominally be about a young woman named April (Katie Holmes) struggling to come to terms with her mother, Joy, while cooking her first Thanksgiving turkey. But April's claim on the film is only titular: It may just as well have been named "Ode to Joy."
One joke of "Pieces of April," among many in this occasionally madcap ensemble comedy, is that the names are ironic. April may be as stormy and unsettled as the month she's named for, but underneath she's a softy. Joy, whose recent cancer diagnosis has brought a barely latent mean streak into florid expression, seems to find most of her happiness in confronting her husband and children with bitter, hurtful truths. She can't stand her firstborn daughter (while April was growing up, Joy called her "the first pancake" -- in other words, the one you throw out), and she's already ridiculing the meal the family's about to eat. In one of the film's funniest and most painful scenes, she makes her husband stop the car, turns to her senile mother and April's two siblings in the back seat and gravely tells them that they must start to prepare -- not for her death, but for how they're going to hide April's cooking in their napkins and throw it out.
Katie Holmes is the title character in
(Teddy Maki -- United Artists)
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"Pieces of April" has a raffish, off-the-cuff feel, and as April's family makes its way from the suburbs to Manhattan's Lower East Side the movie often resembles "The Daytrippers," Greg Mottola's charming 1996 New York picaresque. Hedges cuts easily from the action in the car -- which includes a stop for an impromptu road-kill funeral -- to April's desperate, amusing attempts to make dinner. (This is a young woman who begins to mash potatoes while they're still raw and peels an onion by methodically slicing it lengthwise with a knife.) When she discovers that her oven doesn't work, April is forced to carry the bird from apartment to apartment, a mendicant on a culinary alms mission. She winds up meeting neighbors she's never met -- including a helpful African American couple, a Chinese family, a meat-phobic vegan and a compulsive pug-owning eccentric. This last character is played by Sean Hayes ("Will & Grace") in a sadly understated performance.
Hedges proves to be as fluent and unforced a director as he is a writer; he filmed "Pieces of April" in digital video, and the format's flaws and blown-out sequences actually enhance the mood of a dysfunctional family movie. Holmes, in combat boots, tattoos and raccoon eyeliner, dispels forever her wholesome image from "Dawson's Creek," and Derek Luke ("Antwone Fisher") and Oliver Platt are terrific as her gentle, loving boyfriend and father, respectively.
But "Pieces of April" belongs, wholly and completely, to Clarkson, who delivers Joy's mordant asides and withering observations with a flawless balance of tartness and vulnerability. Joy is helplessly addicted to the approach-avoidance dynamic: She lets you in just enough to push you away with annihilating force. Angry at her disease, continually testing the love of her family, she's a genuine tragic figure, full of self-defeating rage and humor and, finally, frailty.
The quirks and digressions of "Pieces of April" don't necessarily lead to anything surprising -- its emotional tone is too warm, too forgiving for redemption to be in doubt -- but Clarkson's portrayal of Joy is nuanced and unpredictable enough to keep viewers guessing until the admittedly improbable end of the movie. Not until the movie's affecting final moments will the audience know for sure whether, with apologies to T.S. Eliot, April has the cruelest mom.
Pieces of April (80 minutes, at Loews Georgetown, Landmark Bethesda Row and Cineplex Odeon Shirlington) is rated PG-13 for language, sensuality, drug content and images of nudity.
