SDG,

Before you guys get too far with this subject on the mac & cheese thread, let's give it a thread of its own.

I'll be seeing this next week, I think. Is it a Must See? Or should I do something else with my evening.

I had a ticket for it at the festival because it was American, and it was shot in DV. That was enough to justify the screening. But I missed it anyway. FWIW, it was well received at the festival and received an award for first time director or something.

Five minutes into Pieces of April I was afraid that I had picked the wrong movie and blown my evening. Much to my relief, I liked it a lot. It's bright and good-hearted, witty, gently satirical and sharply observed, with an eye to human foibles and weakness but without a malicious bone in its body (well, okay, the film doesn't have much affection for the toffee-nosed Hooray Henry with the new stove). This analogy has limitations, but it's kind of a lower East Side / suburban-American Thanksgiving equivalent to Monsoon Wedding. But droller. Anyway, I liked it.

my review

The award it won at the Chicago Film Fest was the "Audience Appreciation Award," whatever that is.

Kara and i both cried during this film, i must admit i cried several times, but i don't think it will have this effect on everyone. And not that crying in and of itself is the ultimate prerequisite that mandates the importance of a film... But on a personal level, i usually cry when it means that i was touched, and in this instance it was because of my own upbringing and background.

I will agree with SDG that we were rooting for April the whole time. But not just April -- we are rooting for the whole family to come together in the spirit of joy (the mother's name), reconciliation, mercy and forgiveness. The film delivers these concepts with power, in the end capturing these ideals with stills that deliver as well as any motion picture.

There is also a heavy undertone revealing the need to find acceptance from your parents, no matter what road in life you've taken, regardless of whatever the expectations were that may have been thrust upon you at birth. I think that's where my personal emotions came into play.

And the digital camera is beautiful. I love this format of filmmaking, consider me biased.

This is a most excellent Thanksgiving film to take your honey to. I hope it gets more widespread release in the coming weeks, it matches so perfectly the spirit of the coming season. It ended my weekend with great memories and a pleasurable viewing experience.

-s.

What a delightful film!!!

I'd heard good things, but was quite surprised at just how strong a work this is.

It's directed by Peter Hedges, who wrote What's Eating Gilbert Grape?, and I'm again impressed by the way he can choreograph all of the members of a family through such a small but powerful bit of storytelling. The cast is note-perfect. The part of the father is my favorite performance of Oliver Platt's. And there's a moment that surprised me with its emotional impact so that my "heart leapt into my throat" (if you'll excuse the cliche.)

The movie is a gift. Go receive it.

My review.

Jeffrey, didn't the film lose any points with you for its coy but blatantly manipulative toying with the race card? I was able to get past it, but I feel the weight of the objection voiced by this critic:

April's boyfriend, Bobby (Derek Luke), who's African American, heads out Thanksgiving morning on an unspecified mission - he's soon on some mean-looking streets, making frantic calls from payphones, and the film goes out of its way to imply a shady transaction. Turns out Bobby needs a jacket from the Salvation Army. (It's a circular bit of foul play: Hedges smugly upends our expectations about the black character, except it's the director who artificially implanted said expectations, by orchestrating said black character's procurement of a secondhand garment like a drug deal.) Bobby does, however, get into a fight with his nemesis Tyrone (actually a white guy - fooled again!) and arrives home bloodied and disheveled, just as April's family (who's never met him) is pulling up. This is a film that invites you to see the humor in a carload of white folk recoiling from a black man.

-- Dennis Lim, Village Voice

Hmm.

I thought that moment was funny because people like April's family verly likely WOULD have some stereotypes about inner city black people, and we laugh because we realize how wrong that impression is. Bobby is made to look like something he isn't through, ironically, a confrontation with a dumb white guy who looks like he wants to FULFILL that bad stereotype of the inner city black kid.

I didn't feel the moment was inappropriate. And besides, the black couple that live in the building are the warmest, most likeable of the bunch.

I disagree with this statement. It's a film in which a middle class family comes to the inner city to meet up with a long lost family member, and on their way in, the neighborhood looks more and more bleak, until when they finally arrive, a bloodied and beaten-up inner-city guy is hanging on the front of their car saying, "Come on in! April is ready!" From their past history with April and their foreign understanding of the place they are in, they leave.

I found no humor in that scene, and nearly cried when they left.

-s.

[quote]April's boyfriend, Bobby (Derek Luke), who's African American, heads out Thanksgiving morning on an unspecified mission - he's soon on some mean-looking streets, making frantic calls from payphones, and the film goes out of its way to imply a shady transaction. Turns out Bobby needs a jacket from the Salvation Army.[/quote]

That's really unfair, actually. He needs some nice clothes to impress her family. So what? April needs some nice clothes too. It's not a racist judgment. And he is DISMAYED that his friend's "big idea" is to snag something from a secondhand store. He had been led to believe he was being taken somewhere nice.

Well, that is the Village Voice for you. The "young Turks" (as Parks likes to call them) are seemingly able to find at least one reason in every film to disparage it. And this reason is usually one that deals with the director's lack of erudition in post-colonial, pan-feminist, urban semitiotics or something like that.

A little over-analysis can go a long way to creating poor viewing habits. It just seems like a lot of these hipster grad-school-chic critics never allow themselves the pleasure of simply watching a film on its own merits. All of the criticism of Hedge's use of racial humor in the film is just silly and unmerited.

I'm really surprised by this reaction, because to me watching the film I was very aware of the manipulation and it bothered me. And I don't even write for the Village Voice.

FWIW, neither does Roger Ebert, who had the same problems Dennis and I did:

The wild card is Bobby, the boy friend, and here Hedges, the writer-director, half-heartedly tries to do something that doesn't work and is a little offensive. Bobby is middle-class, kind, soft-spoken and a good influence on April, but the screenplay sends him out of the apartment on an obscure mission and hints that it may involve something illegal or dangerous; his behavior and deliberately misleading dialogue plays on cliches about young black men.

And consider the scene where he first encounters April's family. He's bleeding and looks dangerous, and they think they're under attack. Bobby's behavior indicates an undigested idea of who the character is and how it would be funny to portray him. It's not mean-spirited so much as half-baked; Hedges has a confused idea that it would be funny to play on negative associations about young black men, to make it a joke when we find out how nice Bobby is. Not funny.

Here again, from another critic:

It almost feels as though Hedges is scolding the audience for their preconceived notions: the idea that a young black man on an inexplicable mission making a mysterious phone call from a pay-phone could just be arranging a date for buying a secondhand suit, that evil "Tyrone" would actually be a white guy with an urban fetish, or that a family in a bad neighbourhood should act surprised and fearful when a large, bloodied black man would jump on their hood and pound on their door.

Jeffrey Overstreet wrote:

I thought that moment was funny because people like April's family verly likely WOULD have some stereotypes about inner city black people, and we laugh because we realize how wrong that impression is.

But is it really "stereotype," or is it rational interpretation of data, that makes April's family react fearfully, or for that matter that makes us look at the increasingly desperate Bobby on the phone and think "He's mixed up in some bad stuff"? In the end, I was glad to find out that, oh, it was clothes he was after. But I also felt distinctly jerked around.

And besides, the black couple that live in the building are the warmest, most likeable of the bunch.

And this mitigates the problem how? The whole POINT of the criticism, as far as it goes, is that the movie seems to have a running thread in which it is going out of its way to invoke and then upend what it sees as negative stereotypes of blacks. It plucks our sleeve saying, You see, you thought Bobby was after drugs but he wasn't, and you see, you thought that ominous Tyrone fellow was black but he was really white, and you see, the black couple are the warmest, most likeable of the bunch.

That's really unfair, actually. He needs some nice clothes to impress her family. So what? April needs some nice clothes too. It's not a racist judgment. And he is DISMAYED that his friend's "big idea" is to snag something from a secondhand store. He had been led to believe he was being taken somewhere nice.

I think you may be refuting a different point from the one I and the critics I'm citing are making.

Stef wrote:

I disagree with this statement. It's a film in which a middle class family comes to the inner city to meet up with a long lost family member, and on their way in, the neighborhood looks more and more bleak, until when they finally arrive, a bloodied and beaten-up inner-city guy is hanging on the front of their car saying, "Come on in! April is ready!" From their past history with April and their foreign understanding of the place they are in, they leave.

But, again, IS it their "foreign understanding," or is it simply reasonable for anyone to feel a bit threatened when a large, bleeding, unknown stranger in a rough neighborhood throws himself on the hood of your car and urges you to get out?

I found no humor in that scene, and nearly cried when they left.

So did I, but (a) the writer isn't talking about the leaving as the initial recoiling, and ( the "humor" aspect is tangential to the main point, which is that the film seems to be trying to expose the family's latent prejudices when, in fact, their actions aren't prejudicial at all.

But to counterbalance all of those rather obvious plays on racial stereotypes that we bring to the theater anyway are the countless other characters in the storyline. The black family that is so hospitable to April after the initial rocky start, the Asian household that is such a wonderful depiction of a kind immigrant family trying to make it in America, Bobby's friend who is trying to help him find the right suit, etc...

[excerpt from yet unfinished review]
Look at all the white people in the film. We have the two coming down the staircase that don't even respond to her. They are the uber-chic white 20-something bourgeois who think they know it all but really are ignorant elitists. There is the strange white guy with his dog that has a new oven. He is the nutty single white guy, an island in a multi-ethnic sea. There is the totally suburbanized white family. Beneath their suburban veneer is a mess of emotional and psychological issues. They come to the big city and freak out because it is so far from the incubating suburbs that enable them to hide their problems. Of course their son smokes pot. All suburban white kids do. Of course their prissy daughter sings opera. Of course their old grandmother lives in a old folk's home. All old white mothers whose families are tired of them live in old folk's homes. It is this family that is ignorant enough to ditch their daughter because there is some spraypaint on the door to her building.

And then there is Tyrone. The terrible scary black guy that we know is out for Bobby. Suprise: he really is white. Because we all know how ridiculous it is to see white people try to conform to hip-hop culture. Like a white person has any right to usurp those cultural stereotypes.

And then there is April and Bobby. A great, natural interracial relationship. They totally sell me on their relationship. There is a kindness, a gentleness, and mutuality between them that makes their scenes together work very well. Where is the derogatory stereotyping of young black men there? In the whole film we like and appreciate Bobby and what he does for April.

The film is all about these racial codes. So to focus on the ones that play out early in Bobby's situation isn't fair. And quite frankly, everyone I talked to thought Bobby was up to no good. (I didn't, I thought he was going to pick up decorations or something.) So obviously Hedges touches a valuable nerve right there.

[quote]The whole POINT of the criticism, as far as it goes, is that the movie seems to have a running thread in which it is going out of its way to invoke and then upend what it sees as negative stereotypes of blacks. It plucks our sleeve saying, You see, you thought Bobby was after drugs but he wasn't, and you see, you thought that ominous Tyrone fellow was black but he was really white, and you see, the black couple are the warmest, most likeable of the bunch.[/quote]

Okay, to address your point more directly: I think this takes a couple of points and exaggerates them to make Hedges guilty of something awful, when he may be just elbowing us just a bit. Personally, it didn't even OCCUR to me that Bobby was going after drugs. I caught onto his warmth and affection for her right away, and figured he was off to conspire some kind of surprise for her. Tyrone... I didn't think one way or the other about what color he might be. When he showed up, it made total sense. She was involved with a drug-selling faker, and then she met a nice guy who happened to be black and who would stick up for her.

(Weren't some of Tyrone's henchmen black? Wouldn't that contradict the point about bending over backward to subvert stereotypes?)

Michael,

I think we must be at cross purposes. What you call "counterbalancing" I see as reinforcing the very trend that bothers me, and I think that at least some of the critics I've been citing would say the same thing.

For one thing, I don't find a picture in which all (or virtually all) the white people are messed up and all (or virtually all) the minorities are happy, healthy, decent folks any more edifying than the reverse.

More importantly, I find it even less edifying when the audience is deliberately led to believe that at least some of the happy, healthy, decent minority folks are really messed up when in fact (we later learn) they aren't, or that at least some of the messed-up people are minorities when in fact (we later learn) they aren't -- especially when there's the implication that we have seen, not what the filmmaker wanted us to see, but what we ourselves somehow wanted to see.

This is the very implication you make explicit by suggesting that because "everyone you talked to thought Bobby was up to no good," therefore "Hedges must have touched a nerve right there."

No, no, no!

The real reason that everyone you've talked to thought Bobby was up to no good -- along with Ebert, Lim, Chaw, me, my dad, and everyone that I've talked to other than you -- is that the movie deliberately, contrivedly set up the scene to look that way. If you didn't see the scene that way, either you were sophisticated enough to see through the attempted deception, or else you were naive enough not to realize how the scene was framed to look. But there's no "nerve" here to be exposed vis-a-vis white fear of black criminality. The only thing that's been exposed is reasonable and just resentment of the filmmaker deliberately jerking us around and then implying that we were racist for jumping to conclusions.

There's nothing wrong with a cinematic double-cross as long as it's all in good fun. But the double-crosses in Pieces of April (Surprise! Bobby wasn't after drugs after all! Surprise! Tyrone's really a white guy!) aren't like the reverses in movies like The Sting or The Sixth Sense, which are there purely to give the viewer the pleasure of seeing the same events two different ways. These reverses are couched to suggest that we, the viewers, have wrongly jumped to conclusions, having been misled by our own latent stereotyped notions about black people, when in fact we are the victims of the cinematic equivalent of leading the witness.

In effect, the director feigns innocence: You see, Bobby was only after clothes -- naturally, what did you think? Criminal malfeasance? Oh dear no, whatever gave you that impression, hm? I never said he was involved in something shady, did I? What is it about a black man on a public telephone that just automatically makes people assume that something illicit must be going on? Rather revealing, don't you think?

And here, meet "Tyrone" -- why, yes, he's white, why shouldn't he be? I never said he was of any particular race, did I? So a black character in an urban setting receives vague threats, and you just automatically assume black-on-black hostility. I wonder why!

I'm pretty sure Roger Ebert isn't a racist, and I'm pretty sure I'm not either. We thought what the movie wanted us to think because face it, any filmmaker can create any impression he wants and then jerk it away from you if he has a mind to do so. If he's sufficiently clever at it, we may enjoy the experience; otherwise, we will feel jerked around. Enough critics have felt jerked around by Pieces of April to suspect that the problem is not with us.

Darn it Michael, stop making me focus on the one thing I don't like about this movie. :S

Jeffrey Overstreet wrote:

Personally, it didn't even OCCUR to me that Bobby was going after drugs. I caught onto his warmth and affection for her right away, and figured he was off to conspire some kind of surprise for her. Tyrone... I didn't think one way or the other about what color he might be.

Hm, this may be a clue. To me, saying that "Tyrone" in a contemporary American-urban context doesn't instantly connote blackness is a bit like saying that one doesn't think of any ethnicity or nationality particularly at the mention of names like "Liam," "Pawel," "Guido," and so on. (I'm exaggerating only ever so slightly.)

Perhaps, then, the cultural assumptions and associations Pieces of April relies on for its sleight of hand just isn't as immediate a reality for you as for me? Perhaps that's why you slipped through the director's snare while Ebert et al. and I were caught?

Weren't some of Tyrone's henchmen black? Wouldn't that contradict the point about bending over backward to subvert stereotypes?

It would, yes, if someone can verify this.

...
(Sorry...misfire.)

[quote]
If you didn't see the scene that way, either you were sophisticated enough to see through the attempted deception, or else you were naive enough not to realize how the scene was framed to look. But there's no "nerve" here to be exposed vis-a-vis white fear of black criminality. The only thing that's been exposed is reasonable and just resentment of the filmmaker deliberately jerking us around and then implying that we were racist for jumping to conclusions.
[/quote]

Well, I saw the whole charade coming. It seemed heavy-handed enough that I was prepared to play Hedges' game. And when it is all said and done, I think the film does touch an important nerve because it is so easy for Hedges to play that game.

[quote]
These reverses are couched to suggest that we, the viewers, have wrongly jumped to conclusions, having been misled by our own latent stereotyped notions about black people, when in fact we are the victims of the cinematic equivalent of leading the witness.
[/quote]

That is well put. But it seemed that the stereotypes were so over the top, they were so overt, that Hedges can't be indicted for letting us misle ourselves.

[quote]Darn it Michael, stop making me focus on the one thing I don't like about this movie. :S[/quote]

There is plenty to enjoy in the film. So much so that I think Ebert and The V.V. over-reacted to a theme in the film that could be seen in a different light.

(M)Leary wrote:

That is well put. But it seemed that the stereotypes were so over the top, they were so overt, that Hedges can't be indicted for letting us misle ourselves.

That would be true, it seems to me, only if we could somehow have concluded that the movie couldn't possibly be being over the top and overt out of ordinary ham-fistedness and directorial excess. But twenty or thirty minutes into this film, or whenever Bobby got on that phone, I had no reason for such confidence. At that point, I didn't really know the director any better than I knew Bobby.

I've seen far too many films with far more blatant and over-the-top cliches that were really exactly what they seemed to be to accept the argument that in this particular case I somehow Should Have Known Better.

More specifically, I've seen plenty of cinematic boyfriends / husbands / neighbors who seemed a lot more self-evidently respectable than Bobby, with women who seemed a lot more stable and discerning than April, but who nevertheless turned out to be complete psychos, murderers, what have you. So I don't see how I'm meant to have any confidence in this case that, had the director really meant to make Bobby a criminal, why of course he would have been more subtle about it.

Maybe if I'd been watching a film from an experienced director who had earned my trust with a solid body of work, and I ran into what looked like a scene that was overplaying its hand, as the repeated cuts to the increasingly desperate Bobby arguably were, I might have had grounds for confidence that the director was really playing another game. But not here.

You say "I think the film does touch an important nerve because it is so easy for Hedges to play that game." But honestly, if the nerve were really all that important, the game all that easy to play, why would Hedges have to be so "over the top" and "blatant" about it? Why not give us a more genuinely subtle and ambiguous situation, and see if people would leap to the wrong conclusion, rather than deliberately stack the deck against the audience before springing the trap? Doesn't the very over-the-top-ness and overt-ness suggest that, on the contrary, the game was not so easy after all, the supposed stereotypes not so readily invoked, the audience not so ready to leap to the wrong conclusion?

You say you saw through the trick because of the heavy-handedness of the scenes. Doesn't it follow that viewers likely fell into the director's trap, not because of any "nerve" or propensity to racist stereotypes, but simply because they were less adept than you at detecting cinematic blatantness and heavy-handedness?

To find some hidden significance here, to say "must have touched a nerve, huh?" when all they are really guilty of is lack of critical sophistication, seems like... oh, like blaming a film for the director's lack of erudition in post-colonial, pan-feminist, urban semitiotics, don't you think?

BTW, I wasn't myself "misled," exactly, at least not in the sense of actually concluding that the outcome would be that, yes, he was involved in something nefarious. Rather, I saw that the scene was meant to get the audience thinking in that direction, and I saw that the director was artificially stringing out the scenes longer than I expected, but I drew no particular conclusions beyond that.

Tonight was the film's last night in Vancouver, so I figured I should catch it. I liked it quite a bit, and I'm surprised to see that so much of this thread is devoted to this one single particular element of the film, but, well, here I go with my own two bits, now ...

Jeffrey Overstreet
: And besides, the black couple that live in the building are the warmest,
: most likeable of the bunch.

Um, only once we get to know them. When we first meet the woman who answers the door, she makes a couple of basically insulting remarks about April's youth and race and then begins to cackle ENDlessly while April just stands there, clearly embarrassed and wondering what to do next. The moment felt downright cruel, if you ask me, and I find myself wondering if that woman is that rude to ALL the strangers (or even just all the WHITE strangers) that come knocking at her door. Sure, the black woman acts nice AFTERwards (and just how is it that April ended up stepping inside her apartment, anyway?), but you know what they say -- you never get a second chance to make a first impression.

: Personally, it didn't even OCCUR to me that Bobby was going after drugs.

FWIW, I don't think it occurred to me that Bobby might have been looking for drugs, per se, but he did seem to be doing something vaguely quasi-shady, at first. Vaguely. However, I didn't give much thought to this possibility, since this just didn't seem like the kind of movie that would end by revealing that April's boyfriend was yet another jerk.

: Tyrone... I didn't think one way or the other about what color he might be.

Really? Weird. It IS one of those names that appears to be popular among African-Americans, and as I recall, everyone who told Bobby "Tyrone's looking for you" was black too, so of course I assumed Tyrone would be black. Though even as I assumed this, I distinctly remember pondering the fact that there HAVE been white people with that name, such as the late movie star Tyrone Power.

SDG wrote:
: . . . the film seems to be trying to expose the family's latent prejudices
: when, in fact, their actions aren't prejudicial at all.

Good point. Profiling isn't prejudice. It's just what we all do when we work with limited information. Indeed, it's not all that different from what we do when we say, "Hmm, well, we're half-an-hour into an 80-minute movie, and we can see that the family is bickering as it goes to April's place, and we can see that April is trying to patch things up by making dinner, and we can see that April has to turn to her neighbours for help -- I bet this movie, being a Thanksgiving movie after all, will end with lessons about family and neighbourliness and togetherness."

(M)Leary wrote:
: I think the film does touch an important nerve because it is so easy for
: Hedges to play that game.

The only nerve that has been touched, as far as I can see, is that people feel jerked around because the film seems to be saying that perfectly reasonable and acceptable forms of profiling are somehow prejudicial.

VERY funny, smart in places, with lots of surprises and great moments, but somehow it never rose to be more than the sum of those moments. Some of the comic situations seemed somewhat far-fetched at times (but were still funny).

I think that's a good analysis, Alan. I particularly enjoyed Katie Holmes's relationship with her boyfriend, and I was surprisingly moved by the ending. It's funny. I knew it was coming, but I didn't realize how much I wanted it to come.

I know that Stef really liked this one. Stef, you want to convince us of why it's more than just a nice movie?

J Robert

Well, i seem to be filling the "reader/response" quota for the Promontory boards all by myself lately, so why should the fun stop now?

I think i related to April's character more than anything else. In my family situation i have been and will always be the odd man out. Take that and multiply it by twenty for every church relationship i've ever had. Yes, over the years i've made some mistakes -- some drastic ones, at times -- but still there is a longing in my heart to make a Thanksgiving feast for the ones that i love. And i guess a large part of why i was rooting for April was that i was rooting for myself. Perhaps that's a selfish way to approach film, and if one were to tell me so i couldn't help but agree. Still i slip from time to time and cannot help but identify with certain characters, and the "heart" inside me overpowers the "critic."

And too, Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday.

QUOTE

I knew it was coming, but I didn't realize how much I wanted it to come.

Yeah. As far as film talk goes, the ending was like Babette's Feast combined with the hope that persisted in Ordet, films that have come up around here quite often lately. There was such a longing for this family to finally be unified... Even in April's younger sister, the words of condemnation were more like words of lost faith in any possible reconciliation. So why not have one day of peace, which is what the entire family longed for but couldn't ever seem to find a way to make happen.

:spoilers:

When the family left after initially showing up at April's apartment, i was broken-hearted. I longed for restoration, especially with a father who seemed eager to accept April once again. I longed for reconciliation and redemption, if even for just one day.

Much like in House of Sand and Fog we had a situation where the director was asking us to look at a situation from more than one angle. There was no good guy with a white cowboy hat and bad guy with black leather boots. Everyone had an angle, a point of identification that made them real. For much of April's family the frustration they shared was in years and years of watching someone they loved go down many wrong roads. For April, it was gaining independence, making wrong choices, and the regret she felt when losing her family in the process. And how can you win someone back after forcing them to lose their faith in you?

I don't think i rooted for a character more last year than April. I wanted to see her win with her family, just for one day! Not that every wrong would be cleared up and none of the hurt would be remembered, but just that for one moment all of them might function in the way that they as a family really wanted to.

So in Pieces of April i can see that i loved it because i identified with it from my background and secret needs. I can completely understand someone else not getting it. It's really hard to talk someone into loving a film when approaching it from this angle.

-s.

Alan wrote:
: I didn't see a thread for this film . . .

<a href=http://promontoryarts.com/viewtopic.php?t=936>Ahem</a>. Sometimes the search engine generates more than one page. Too bad we can't merge threads, but can only split them!

So, you don't remember the debate we had over the film's use of racial stereotypes?

[ADMIN note: Now we can merge them! (And I have done so)]

QUOTE

Alan wrote: : I didn't see a thread for this film . . . Ahem.  Sometimes the search engine generates more than one page.  Too bad we can't merge threads, but can only split them! So, you don't remember the debate we had over the film's use of racial stereotypes?

Thanks! I knew I could count on you :wink:

No, I don't remember that, especially since I generally avoid reading threads about films I haven't seen.

As far as the search engine and merging threads go, just wait a few weeks.

I did not think that Bobby necessarily had some evil purpose in going on for "his thing," I thought it could have been a doctor's appointment, visiting a former girlfriend, grandmother in a nurshing home, or anything else that was a sensitive subject.

Steve, I'm surprised at your reaction to the use of race in this film but not in The Passion, based on what you've said above.

QUOTE

I did not think that Bobby necessarily had some evil purpose in going on for \"his thing,\" I thought it could have been a doctor's appointment, visiting a former girlfriend, grandmother in a nurshing home, or anything else that was a sensitive subject.

Huh? How is someone making increasingly agitated payphone calls to "Latrell" saying "I'm at the place," etc., leading up to a doctor's appointment, visiting a former girlfriend, etc?

QUOTE

Steve, I'm surprised at your reaction to the use of race in this film but not in The Passion, based on what you've said above.

Race is clearly part of the conscious theme and point of Pieces of April. I don't believe it is in The Passion, except perhaps in the moment the Roman centurion's scornful anti-Semitism is displayed in all its ugliness.

QUOTE

QUOTE I did not think that Bobby necessarily had some evil purpose in going on for \"his thing,\" I thought it could have been a doctor's appointment, visiting a former girlfriend, grandmother in a nurshing home, or anything else that was a sensitive subject. Huh? How is someone making increasingly agitated payphone calls to "Latrell" saying "I'm at the place," etc., leading up to a doctor's appointment, visiting a former girlfriend, etc?

"Latrell" shouldn't have anything to do with it!

I meant before that point in the film, anyway. After that, anything's up, although it was obvious more covert than might previously have been imagined.

Saw this Friday, enjoyed it immensely. Up there right next to THE STATION AGENT on my Faves O' 2003 List - and sign me up now for the Patricia Clarkson fan club! Two such opposite roles, and both played to absolute perfection. SEARCHING FOR DEBRA WINGER notwithstanding, don't tell me there are no decent parts for "women of a certain age" - there sure as heck are, if you're willing to look past Hollywood and get paid scale.

*

As much as I dread the "Spot The Christian" game, for all it can become, I still get excited when I suspect that an artist whose work really affects me might also share my faith. Doesn't diminish the value of the work if it turns out they don't, but...

Anyhow, PIECES OF APRIL got me wondering, it just seemed to have such grace for a whole world of fallen human beings. So when the credits rolled and I started spotting a certain pattern in the acknowledgements, I really started to wonder. The gratitude gang included;

Greenbush Presbyterian Church
Notre Dame Church
The Salvation Army
St. Thomas Aquinas College
Willis Avenue United Methodist Church
Rev. Robert B. and Laurel Hedges

As for that last one, you've got to guess that director Peter Hedges at the very least has a brother or a dad who's a pastor somewhere. Maybe Bob connected his fund-limited film-making family member with all the churches he knew in NYC, and they provided low-cost or no-cost sites for food services, make-up and equipment storage in boroughs where that might have been prohibitively expensive. Or maybe those are Peter's contacts? Just wondering.

Certainly the kinship I felt with the guy only increased when I listened to the director's commentary track: the first such track I've ever actually enjoyed, or made it all the way through! He just seemed so warm, humble, appreciative - a decent man in a business that's crowded by pretentious and over-sized egos. And every now and then his language hinted at a faith, or a faith background. Or at least, at things that are important to him that are essential to my Christian faith.

There's just so much life and love, and the spirit of moving on, and making peace in this sequence. ... I always thought we'd hold on the picture and we elect not to, because this is a moment of grace, and even moments of grace pass.

...I started this film in response to my mother's passing from cancer... It is a movie that's been made out of some of what was learned: that life is fragile, life is passing, and if we don't get it said to the people we need to say it to, we may never get that chance. ...

This is the thank you section... For every name there's a story, there's a sacrifice, or there's a leap of faith.

If this guy doesn't have the gospel inside him, it sure sounds like it's close at hand!

It also catches my eye that GILBERT GRAPE is his. Years since I've seen it, but it seemed to me to be similarly suffused with grace - enough so that I recently bought the DVD, to get to know the film fresh. Hedges also did the screen adaptation of ABOUT A BOY, and you know, revisiting that one not too long ago, my appreciation for it multiplied as I watched it closely - it is gorgeously constructed, layered with quite intricate and subtle detail, a real story of a man moving from self-centred isolation into community. I can't help but notice even there the themes of grace extended to very human beings, the contrast of perfectionist self-sufficiency with messy inter-dependence - and the way both BOY and APRIL culminate with a mismatched community gathered to eat a festive meal, one at Christmas, the other Thanksgiving.

Wonder how to find out more about Mr Hedges?

*

As for the whole issue of race, I think it's very much a minor issue - fair enough to explore it in this thread if that's what catches people's interest, but hardly a major deal. And I think that the usually estimable Mr Ebert's strong reaction to that minor theme skewed his perception of the film - or maybe he was just having an off day. He's entitled.

But he really misjudges other aspects of the film, particularly that closing sequence. He figures the snapshot approach of the final scene is evidence that Hedges simply ran out of time to shoot it properly. I thought the technique was extraordinarily apt and evocative, clearly anticipated with the presence of the brother's camera throughout the rest of the movie, a great way to allow for understatement, image instead of talk, gesture rather than dialogue and explication.

The moment when April leans over - which grows naturally out of the stylistic choice that was made about the approach to the final scene - and says something in her sister's ear that we don't hear, something that obviously fills her tightly-wound sister with strong emotions - was extraordinary. I was reminded of a similar moment near the end of the highly touted LOST IN TRANSLATION. I think old Rodge skimmed the press packet, concluded the film had been made in a rush, took a disliking to the Bobby sub-plot and wasn't able to see that final scene (for example) for what it was.

A wonderful, small film with heart. Would make a great companion piece to THE STATION AGENT. A kind of film I've got a lot of time for.

*

Oh, and by the way, Jeffrey, nice review - you really captured my experience of the movie. And that's a nice line indeed; "it takes a village to cook a turkey."

And SDG, I think you got it pretty much exactly right when you describe the racial plot-twists "a limited flaw" - that puts a more balanced perspective on the whole question than the extensive and scrupulous discussion on this thread seemed to indicate.

One other "limited flaw" which none of the critics that I read noted, but which provided a bit of grit on the lens for me, was Sean Hayes in the role of Wayne: there was a problem of tone, or approach, or something. As well crafted as it was, it seemed to belong in a slightly different movie from the other performances: the other characters had a naturalism to them that made his turn seem slightly stylized, a bit too premeditated and "performed." Of course, those attributes are particularly apt for a character like Wayne, so the slight mismatch of register is easy to rationalize.

Caught this on Friday night. Disappointed to find that the thread here is dominated by the race issue, but paradoxically I feel I have to at least make some comments on that. IIRC Bobby is played as a positive character at the start. He realises how important this day is for April so its him that draggs her out of bed. The prime reason for him leaving the flat though is that April wants him out of her hair. That was so blatant that I can't believe that you all missed that. What bobby is doing then becomes more of a filler than seeming to be a particular mission, and its only really at the phone box scene that you think he might be up to something, but given that by then we know just how disfunctional April is, it doesn't really seem that shady even if he is trying to get hold of some drugs (but at the same time I thought he might also be buying a present for April or something like that).

I assumed Tyrone was black. I had a friend called Tyrone who was huge (not as tall as me but absolutely solid) and was black. All other uses of Tyrone I've come across were black so given as Peter says all the contexts we hear of him in, its seems fair to assume he is. And yes his cohorts were black.

No onto the film.



I must admit I'm a really sucker for reconciliation / grace films. The moment in the "bathroom" (you crazy Yanks where's the bath?) where Joy see's another mother deserting her little girl made me cry like a baby, such a powerful well conceived moment - the whole film was worth it for that.

So, even though Thanksgiving is this weird festival that you guys have that I only really know about because of, ahem, Friends, I still loved it.

So is anyone going to watch this for Thanksgiving this year?

Matt

Yes.

(Actually, we will watch this the weekend before, since we will be doing all the cooking that day).

Here's hoping it lasts repeated holiday viewings...

Nick

Well I cried more the second time that the first so that's a good sign.

Matt

I'm hoping I'll be able to watch it with my family when I visit them next week--I just got a cheap previously viewed copy. It will be a great improvement over our usual holiday fare (National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation is a favorite of many in my family )

--Teresa

Yeah, this is a great Thanksgiving movie. My other favorite, which no one ever talks about, is Avalon, but Pieces of April is better.

Which Avalon are you talking about?!? I ask because, whenever I hear Avalon, I immediately think of Mamoru Oshii's version, and for some reason, I don't think that's the one you were referring too.

BTW... thanks all for the idea. I was racking my brain trying to think of something to show for the next meeting of my movie discussion group... and this is a perfect idea.

There's more than one? I'm thinking of the Barry Levinson film about Jewish immigrants in America. The film spans several years but is built around two holiday -- July 4th and Thanksgiving.

Funny timing on the thread, we just got done planning a "Pieces of April Night" with a bunch of high schoolers from church. I believe it's set for Friday night, the night after Thanksgiving. Should be fun. I love the post-Passion of The Christ church world. R is for REDEEMED.

edit: Oops, just realized it's actually PG-13. Whatever. Wasn't she nude in bed at the beginning? I guess I thought she was, maybe I'm wrong. Can't keep track of who gets nude and who doesn't, and frankly, I don't really care. The post-Passion rule still applies, just not here.

-s.

: Wasn't she nude in bed at the beginning?

Not that I recall.

I'm actually dying to do something so I can watch this again, but unfortunately its hard cos I'm not American. andf I keep getting weird looks when I suggest it.

Matt

I can't remember about the nudity issue, but there *is* the implied-sex scene where she's reciting ingredients for Thanksgiving Dinner in increasingly ecstatic tones....

Yeah, she's on top of her boyfriend, in bed, and she falls across him in a heave of ecstacy.

A co-worker to whom I had recommended this film watched this film with his two teenage daughters. I warned him about that scene, and he said later that the scene had been awkward -- but more for his kids than for him.

IIRC, there are pics of the mother's (Patricia Clarkson's) naked breasts--before and after surgery. Other than that, this film is quite tame.

Nick

I finally got to see Pieces of April on DVD, and all I can say is I wish I had seen it a lot sooner--maybe last November

And within two days, I watched it twice, with and without commentary, AND watched the "making of" featurette, and cried EVERY TIME [spoiler]April comes down the decorated stairs and opens the door to find nothing but an empty street.[/spoiler].

Definitely a keeper.

Welcome into the fold, BethR. I could cry for hours, but I think it's more about the watcher's background than it is anything else.

-s.

[spoiler]And then the Doc-level shot of her trudging back up the stairs past dead streamers, popping balloons. Oh my. I think I'll go watch it again....[/spoiler]

P.S. Who's that girl being led by the Spirit in the desert?

Absolutely!


Buffy, of course! One of her vision-quests, interpreted metaphorically. It's my Lenten avatar.

Really? It's the scene [spoiler]in the bathroom where the mother sees another mother abandon her child and realises that's what she's done[/spoiler] that is the one that gets me. But then I'm a sucker for [spoiler]reconciliation[/spoiler]

Matt

Aw, man, that's the killer for me, too. [spoiler] The look of shame on the little girl's face, and the creeping realization on Clarkson's face; way powerful.[/spoiler]

That, and the [spoiler]still photos shot by April's brother as she opens the door, sees her mom and they embrace.[/spoiler]

Actually, if we're talking real tears, that's where they kick in for me. That whole final sequence just does me in.