festive cheer: Katie Holmes makes Thanksgiving dinner in ‘Pieces of April’
it’s streaming on Amazon Prime in the US and UK
Herewith a free taste of my new, subscriber-only project, Festive Cheer, in which I recommend a fun, merry, classic, or otherwise worthy movie to stream this holiday season.
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Thank you, and enjoy!
—MaryAnn
A very young Katie Holmes attempts to prepare a Thanksgiving dinner for her family in her tiny East Village, NYC, apartment. It doesn’t go well. And that’s before her guests even arrive. As I said in my 2004 review of Pieces of April:
What’s particularly intriguing about this entry in the I-hate-the-family-especially-at-the-holidays genre is that punky April and the rest of her straighter-laced family don’t actually spend any time together during the film — it’s all her getting the dinner ready and them making the trip to her place and none of them really enthusiastic about the day and wondering why they’re even bothering. Which makes the film all the more compelling — though it eschews the typical portrait of the squabbles and digs and half-intentional insults that often characterize love/hate family relationships, it ends up with a lot to say about the comfortable mess that is “family” anyway, and it does so without an iota of schmaltz.
Holmes is terrific, and her parents are played by Patricia Clarkson and Oliver Platt, and they’re never not great.
Writer-director Peter Hedges made his directorial debut with this microbudget ($300K) indie shot in a quick-and-dirty 16 days. He’d previously written the screenplay for 2002’s About a Boy, and his next film would be 2007’s Dan in Real Life. This one has a similar quirky, unsentimental, life-is-messy vibe. And it’ll make you feel a lot better about whatever food-prep disasters you may encounter in your holiday kitchen adventures.
Pieces of April is streaming on Amazon Prime in the US, to rent or buy, or free for Prime members; and on Amazon Prime in the UK, as a rental.
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