Katie Holmes plays April Burns who is trying to cook her estranged family a Thanksgiving Day meal despite all the things going wrong for her.
--Randy
Pieces Of April
Directors: Peter Hedges
Producers: Paul S. Lyons, Alexis Alexander And Gary Winick
Writers: Peter Hedges
Features: n/a
Characters:
April Burns...Katie Holmes
Joy Burns...Patricia Clarkson
Mr. Burns...Oliver Platt
Bobby...Derek Luke
Grandma Dottie...Alice Drummond
Latrell...Sisqo
Timmy Burns...John Gallagher, Jr.
Genre: Family
Review:
I went into "Pieces Of April" at the Tenth Annual Writers' Festival held in Austin, Texas with two expectations. The first was that Katie Holmes would be in this movie and just possibly the song "Pieces Of April" by Three Dog Night would be used. I expected nothing else and hoped I would be pleasantly surprised with more. The song "Pieces Of April" was not in the movie though Peter Hedges who was in attendance did say it was originally supposed to be in it. I had almost gotten my two expectations. Still, Katie Holmes is hot so I could manage my disappointment. I know that is not the way a film festival movie should be chosen, but that is how I do it if I don't have much information on a film.
This film revolves around an outcast daughter named April Burns played by Katie Holmes who invites her family to come for a Thanksgiving Day dinner in her lower East Side apartment in New York City. Her family lives out of the city on Long Island, but rises early to make the journey though the mother, Joy(Patricia Clarkson), and Dad(Oliver Platt) both have misgivings on how the dinner will turn out as they have no confidence in April. Beth(Allison Pill), a bratty teenager and Timmy(John Gallagher, Jr.), another teenager into photography are April's siblings coming along with the parents. April has a black boyfriend named Bobby(Derek Luke) who lives with her. This dinner means a lot to April. It is her way of showing her cynical parents that she can make it on her own even though she has never cooked a turkey or hardly anything before. Naturally, anything that can go wrong does for poor Katie.
Let me talk about the good things in this movie. Katie Holmes looks lovely. She has a sort of punk rock attire for this movie. She has two shades of color to her dark hair which is split by two short pigtails with one strand of hair falling from the top of her head. Her outfit is punkish and she wears long slim leather boots. Her hands have a kind of string glove on them though it is more string than glove. Katie's eyes are brown and bright with her body lithe and sinewy. Yet her face still shows baby fat. She has skin that glows alongside a radiant smile. Other than Patricia Clarkson doing a bang up job playing her distracted mother, that's all the good things in this movie.
Now I'll talk about the bad things. The film has an independent look, as in there wasn't enough money look. The lighting is drab with many scenes being underlighted. In one scene in which the dad drives the car out of a dark tunnel a white light envelops the screen blinding the viewer. When April is in one scene with a black neighbor the lighting causes the black woman to be too dark. Black people absorb light while white people reflect light. It is tricky to get the right setting for shots like this. In "Brown Sugar" the director, Rick Famuyiwa, would talk about the problems he had with the film lab because they would automatically push up the lightness of his film to compensate for the black actors in it. The lab did not know he had already adjusted the lighting as he wanted it.
Another problem is the film drags as there is not anything near a convoluted plot to this movie: April has trouble cooking her meal while her family drives to visit her. The film goes back and forth between the family's journey and April's problem of finding an oven to cook her turkey in once she finds out her stove is broken. To make this movie last a paltry eighty-one minutes, Hedges has to stall the family's trip. First, the family picks up April's senile grandmother from a retirement home. Cut to April. Then the family stops to eat at a Krispy Kreme(even though they are going to eat at April's). Cut to April. Then the mother throws up at a convience store bathroom(the mother has cancer). Cut to April. The family leaves the convience store. Cut to April. The family is in the car driving on a road. Cut to April. The family is burying a squirrel that the dad accidentally ran over. Cut to April. Get the drift?
Throughout all this April's boyfriend, in a small subplot, goes out to get a suit on the street. At first it looks like he has a secret drug deal or like going on, but he is only trying to buy an inexpensive suit for the parent's arrival. Along the way he is waylaid by an old rival and his gang of kids on bicycles looking very non-threatening. Yes, I said bicycles--it's just so embarrassing.
When it comes down to it this whole picture is an embarrassment. It should never have been made. It is coming out in October to capitalize on the upcoming Thanksgiving Day holiday spirit. In the after screening Q & A, Peter Hedges states that originally he had found people to put up four to five million dollars, but deals like this failed three times. Figuring three was the charm, Hedges gave up on outside financing and made a deal with an independent company to back the picture for three hundred thousand dollars. Any money made would be split between the company, him and the actors. No one had a real salary even though the actors made a minimum two hundred dollars a day due to union regulations. Katie Holmes was the only original actor to follow the project to the end as the original millions of dollars in money dried up.
Hedges explained that the title of this movie was indeed from the Three Dog Night song as I had surmised. Hedges had planned to include it but, at the last minute he went with Stephen Merritt because his producer John S. Lyons thought the Three Dog Night song wimpy. Merritt was one of Hedges' favorite singers though he had never met him. He picked up the phone and Merritt was there. This film will open this coming Friday, October 17, 2003 in Los Angeles and later in other parts of the country.
The only thing to recommend about this movie is Katie Holmes. If you are not a big fan this movie is best avoided. When a movie comes in at eighty-one minutes it means one thing. That seems to be the universally recognized amount of time an audience can watch a movie that has nothing going on. "From Justin To Kelly" and "Phone Booth" are both eighty-one minutes. In the latter movie, it is only Colin Farrell's outstanding acting that carries the non-action feature.
I will give this movie one out of five stars(the one being for Katie Holmes).
----Randy