Pieces of April
Screenwriter Peter Hedges (
About a Boy and
What’s Eating Gilbert Grape) makes his directorial debut with the best entry to date in the burgeoning Thanksgiving Day-from-hell genre. Estranged, tattooed wild child April (
Dawson’s Creek’s Katie Holmes) invites her parents (Oliver Platt and Patricia Clarkson) and siblings to share food, meet her boyfriend (
Antwone Fisher’s Derek Luke) and maybe even mend family fences in her grungy New York apartment. Her kin accept the offer with mixed feelings and plow through a comical, emotionally oscillating road trip. Meanwhile, April discovers her stove does not work and races to prepare a meal with plenty of both help and aggravation from her neighbors. Clarkson is an unpredictable wonder as April’s seriously ill mother, who is running out of time on a more dramatic scale than her daughter, in a film that includes a refreshingly un-sensationalized interracial coupling.