Pieces of April
When is an edgy independent film not an edgy independent film? When it has the soul of a sitcom.
Writer-director Peter Hedges's ''Pieces of April'' represents the downside of the new digital-film democracy. Jaggedly shot, hazily lit, scored with songs from the unimpeachable New York songwriter Stephin Merritt, and stocked with an alterna-cast that includes the reigning queen of the indies, Patricia Clarkson, the movie is nonetheless sentimental hokum.
Not that there's anything wrong with that. A little feel-good movie can be a tonic in an autumn landscape littered with dour art films and Oscar-baiting dramas. ''Pieces of April,'' though, is a shell game that replaces the comedy of observation it sets out to be with glib one-liners, shallow characterizations, and a sweet but naive vision of racial harmony. Can't we all just get along, Hedges wonders -- even on Thanksgiving?
The ''April'' of the title is April Burns, a waifish punkette who has fled her stultifying suburban clan to live in walk-up tenement squalor with her gentle African-American boyfriend, Bobby (Derek Luke of ''Antwone Fisher''). April is played by Katie Holmes, and right there's the movie's first problem. Holmes is sympathetic and as cute as a bug, but she's about as much of an angry punk as the actors in the Broadway production of ''Rent.'' April's black fingernails seem a costume choice rather than a commitment, and her outbursts of rage carry all the oomph of a damp popgun.
''Pieces of April'' cuts back and forth between April's disastrous attempts to cook Thanksgiving dinner -- raw turkey has never looked less appetizing -- and the deeply dysfunctional family that is hurtling toward her in a station wagon. Her mother, Joy (Clarkson), is in the terminal stages of breast cancer, and the kid-gloves treatment she receives from her dullard husband (Oliver Platt), prim daughter Beth (the aptly named Alison Pill), and slacker son (John Gallagher Jr.) stands in direct contrast to her own comic bitterness. Joy has no patience for social niceties anymore, which translates into a kind of giddy cruelty that is the movie's freshest aspect. Clarkson is far and away the finest thing here, and the only evidence of genuine pain and grace.
April, meanwhile, is coping with a broken oven and is forced to traipse up and down her building's stairwell looking for gas and human connections. A kindly black couple (Lillias White and Isiah Whitlock) gets the turkey halfway there while teaching her about familial togetherness and the kind of cranberry sauce that doesn't come from a can. A Chinese family also welcomes her in. The nonethnic neighbors are strictly one-note, from the strident vegan in 4A (Susan Bruce) to the fey eccentric in 5D (Sean Hayes of ''Will and Grace,'' playing a ''Saturday Night Live'' sketch character instead of a person).
Time and again, Hedges backs off from the risk taking that comes with honest human comedy and settles for easier laughs. Beth, to take one example, is a cartoon prig who gets one teensy moment of the filmmaker's sympathy -- when she realizes her mother's memories of April as a baby consist of things she herself did -- and then collapses back into two-dimensionality. That glint makes you want more, but Hedges isn't giving, at least not the way he did in his script for the 1993 Johnny Depp film ''What's Eating Gilbert Grape.''
For what it's worth, this seems to work for a lot of people. ''Pieces of April'' was an audience favorite at the Sundance and Toronto film festivals, and it has received rapturous reviews in some quarters. In other viewers, it may prompt the crankiness that comes from opportunities squandered and depths gone unplumbed. The movie ends with a sentimental vision of unity that, admittedly, warmed this weary moviegoer's heart. If that vision was earned, I might even have melted.
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