Review of Pieces of April (2003) by Jessica W — 30 Nov 2009

I hesitate to criticize this movie since I have a number of friends who love it and identify with it, but I never warmed up to Pieces of April. I think it's because the main character, April, is the black sheep of her family. And when I say "black sheep", I mean that her mother and sister actively hate her while her dad and brother don't seem to have the courage (or concern) to stand up for her. This kind of familial hatred is so far removed from what I've experienced in life, that I found the characters to be so over the top as to be unbelievable.

The plot is sweetly simple: April Burns invites her estranged family over for Thanksgiving dinner in her crappy apartment in the Lower East side of New York. When she realizes that her oven doesn't work, it is just the beginning of a series of mishaps that would be otherwise funny and charming if the scenes didn't keep cutting to her outrageously awful parents and sibling driving toward her apartment and badmouthing her the entire time. Patricia Clarkson plays April's mom--a woman with terminal cancer who uses her disease as an excuse to be a narcissistic sociopath. I truly hoped this woman would die before she could reach April's apartment and cause the poor girl even more heartache. Oliver Platt plays Dad, a puffy, milquetoast man afraid of standing up to his frail wife. The family insists on stopping on the way to April's apartment to get donuts and snacks (because they assume April's cooking will be disgusting). When they finally get to their destination, only to realize that April lives in a dump and has an African-American boyfriend, they abandon her altogether. My question is, why doesn't April cut these people out of her life completely? They really don't deserve her love. I guess the movie is trying to show that forgiveness trumps everything on almighty Thanksgiving Day, but April's family is so emotionally abusive, it comes off as martyrdom on April's part.

Spoilers...

One of the last scenes, where April's family ditches her to go to a restaurant and her mom witnesses another mother yelling at her daughter in the restaurant bathroom, which causes April's mom to realize the error of her ways and get on some random dude's motorcycle to head back to April, is laughably unrealistic. Would this woman truly overcome years of selfish-bordering on psychotic behavior in one instant? Maybe in a typical Hollywood movie, but Pieces of April is filmed to be almost documentary-like, with a handheld camera and minimal script. The movie strives to be true to life but the personalities and actions of the characters are so fake.

The one thing I can say about Pieces of April is that my dislike of it probably has more to do with me than with the movie itself. Viewers who really are the black sheep of their families will probably understand and relate to this film more than I can, so I can't dismiss it completely. Also, Stephen Merritt of The Magnetic Fields did the soundtrack, which is wonderful.

Pieces of April spends 95% of its time proving how awful April's family is, so that the redemptive ending left me scratching my head. This family did nothing to deserve April's forgiveness--and Thanksgiving Day is not magical enough to overcome decades of abuse. I just didn't buy it.