Pieces of April (opens Friday, November 7, at the Little) has
two separate storylines that approach each other like a pair of proverbial
math-class trains. Train A is a dumpy apartment on the Lower East Side, home to
21-year-old punk-princess April Burns (Katie Holmes) and her new boyfriend
Bobby (Derek Luke). April, who is like a Bizarro World Joey Potter with
tattoos, dyed hair, and ratty clothes, struggles to wake up and get out of bed.
It’s Thanksgiving morning, and while the rest of her big-city pals are likely
still catching z’s, April has to get up and prepare the Big Holiday Meal.
Trouble is,
April doesn’t know how to cook her way out of a paper bag. This situation is
compounded by a broken oven, a neat disappearing trick by Bobby, and a general
resentment toward the family she will be hosting in a few hours. April is the
oldest child, or “the first pancake,” as she painfully calls herself. She’s
better without her family, and they’re better off without her. Still, that
doesn’t stop April from making a concerted effort to pull off a decent meal.
This involves knocking on the doors of her neighbors for TRA (turkey roasting
assistance), which is where we meet the catty Wayne (Sean Hayes), and the
helpful yet skeptical Evette (Lillias White) and Eugene (Isiah Whitlock Jr).
Train B,
meanwhile, is hurtling toward Manhattan from suburban Pennsylvania in the form
of a station wagon. Inside is April’s family, and it’s dysfunctional enough to
make you think of Jodie Foster’s Home for
the Holidays at least seven times. Mom (Patricia Clarkson) has cancer, and
this is likely to be her last Thanksgiving. Whiny sister Beth (Alison Pill),
who got an A in home ec, wonders why they have to drag sickly Mom to the
ungrateful April’s apartment when April can’t even peel a potato. Pothead
brother Timmy (John Gallagher Jr.) bickers with Beth when he isn’t rolling
pain-alleviating fatties for his mom. Dad (Oliver Platt) is excited to meet
April’s new boyfriend, because she said Bobby reminds her of him, while senile
Grandma (Alice Drummond) assumed April died years ago.
Like School of Rock, Pieces isn’t so much about telling a new story as it is about
taking an old story and breathing some fresh air into it. Nobody will be
surprised at how Pieces ends, but
many will be happy at how it reaches its very Thanksgiving-y conclusion. The
acting is strong across the board, with Holmes finally getting a chance to show
some range and Clarkson netting a Sundance Special Jury Prize for her acting.
Tami
Reiker, who shot High Art and some of
HBO’s gorgeous Carnivàle, does a
great job wielding her handheld digital video camera here, but I’m still not
sure what to make of the thread involving Luke’s character. Not only is it
distractingly unnecessary (aside from filling out the already skeletal running
time), but it also involves Sisqo, and that’s just something I can’t get
behind.
Richard Curtis has penned some of the biggest UK-to-US hits in Notting
Hill and Four Weddings and a Funeral,
but Love
Actually (opens Friday everywhere) is his first directorial effort. The
result is a depressingly upbeat film that would be the perfect Christmas
picture if it weren’t being released seven weeks before that particular
holiday.
On one
hand, I’d like to congratulate Curtis for making a movie featuring 10
significant story threads that isn’t as jumpy and uneven as you might expect
from a first-time director. On the other hand, I deplore him for taking this
very smart cast and occasionally degrading them into humor and situations
usually found in dreck like My Big Fat
Greek Wedding.
Since
I don’t have any hands left, I guess I’ll have to use a foot to apply a
crushing blow to Curtis’s swimsuit region for literally forcing the audience to
applaud several times at the end of Actually.
But since his film isn’t nearly as saccharine as an inevitably PG-13-rated
American version would likely be (this is full of nasty language and more than
a few pairs of bare boobs), I’ll spare him from being Rochambeaued with my
other foot.
In a sense,
the notion of cramming 10 different stories into the same film works because,
say, if you tire of one, it will be gone in just a few minutes. But on the off
chance you become really attached to any of them — too bad. There isn’t
enough time to spend on any one particular story thread, and that turns most of
the characters into walking clichés… with a couple of exceptions.
Essentially,
Actually is about a gaggle of people
attempting to overcome various differences in hopes of finding True Holiday
Love (herein referred to as THL) during the five weeks leading up to Christmas.
The differences could be language (Colin Firth is an author who can’t
understand his hot Portuguese housekeeper), nationality (Kris Marshall is a
loser in the UK but believes he can score Grade A women in the States), caste
(Hugh Grant is the new British PM who falls for an underling from the wrong
side of the tracks), age (Laura Linney wants to bang her steamy young
co-worker), marital status (the married Alan Rickman considers screwing his
single assistant), or the River Styx (the mourning Liam Neeson’s wife just died).
There’re more, too. So many more.
In the
notes I took during the film, I mentioned how nobody had to conquer the Gay
Barrier, but Curtis, of course, finds a way to cram that into the already
bulging story, as well. The notes came in handy, since you could use them to
check off each thread as it is neatly wrapped up in the last reel.
I
could have used less of Marshall’s improbable story (he gets to shag Elisha
Cuthbert, Ivana Milicevic, January Jones, Shannon Elizabeth, and Denise
Richards), and much less of Grant doing the Cruise-in-Risky Business thing with a Pointer Sisters song before being
caught by a stuffy staffer at No. 10 Downing Street. And the two more
interesting storylines — involving a washed-up rocker (Bill Nighy) making an
unlikely Christmas comeback and two porn movie stand-ins (Martin Freeman and
Joanna Page) — seemed underdeveloped. But it may have only seemed that way
because they were the most interesting to me. And now that I think about it,
everything was underdeveloped.
Actually is one of those films you enjoy
while you’re watching it, then realize how truly empty it is some time later.
But that’s okay, especially for a light holiday film that, for many people, is
only going to serve as a brief distraction from shopping and dealing with
Thanksgiving relatives. It’s easy to be sidetracked, too, as Curtis’s London
is, as always, filled with very beautiful people with nice clothes and even
nicer flats (complete with state-of-the-art flat screen televisions). And he
even includes a lovely message for anyone who plans on traveling for the
holidays: It’s perfectly fine to dash past airport security, but only in the
name of THL.
Interested in raw, unsanitized movie ramblings from Jon?
Visit his site, Planet Sick-Boy (www.sick-boy.com),
or listen to him on WBER’s Friday Morning Show.
This article appears in Nov 5-11, 2003.
