It’s Thanksgiving in the US this coming Thursday, so I’ll be recommending some appropriately themed flicks this week. Apologies to my non-American readers, but I make this promise: I won’t share any turkeys, and all the films will have more going for them than just a big dinner.
The story never even makes it as far as the dinner in 2003’s Pieces of April. Instead it’s all Katie Holmes’s punky East Village, NYC, denizen scrambling to prepare the turkey-day meal in her ill-equipped tenement flat while her estranged family — including Patricia Clarkson as her mother and Oliver Platt as her dad — make the drive in from the suburbs… all of them wondering why they hell they’re even bothering.
Schmaltz and sentiment are most definitely not on the menu in writer-director Peter Hedges’s bitter dramedy. Everyone here is fairly prickly and hard to like, but their holiday travails end up saying a lot that is wise and witty about the comfortable mess that is “family” anyway.
US: stream on Max (via Prime); rent/buy on Prime and Apple TV
UK: rent on Prime
See Pieces of April at Letterboxd for more viewing options.
