| The film What’s Cooking? (2000) features four families in Los Angeles celebrating Thanksgiving–African American, Jewish, Mexican, and Vietnamese. Although they live at the four corners of an intersection of two streets in South Hollywood, the adults do not know one another; only their children are friends, practicing multicultural awareness. Pieces of April, directed and written by Peter Hedges, is an apparent riposte to that film. April Burns (played by Katie Holmes) has invited her Caucasian parents and family to a Thanksgiving dinner to meet her domestic partner, African American boyfriend, Bobby (played by Derek Luke). Although she is the black sheep of the family, having upset the family with a fire in the kitchen, an arrest for drug possession, and countless other misdeeds, her mother Joy (played by Patricia Clarkson) is the first one in the family car that morning, eager to see her daughter. A recent mastectomy patient, she is not feeling her best but wants to see her daughter before her death, which appears imminent. Her unexpected early presence in the car serves to mobilize the rest of the family to make the drive from upstate New York to her apartment in Manhattan, a trip of several hours. Although her husband Jim (played by Oliver Platt) dutifully makes the drive, her other daughter Beth (played by Alison Pill) is against the trip, while Joy’s senile mother Dottie (played by Alice Drummond) and her son Timothy (played by John Gallagher, Jr.) go along without objection. While the Burns family makes the long drive, April tries to organize the dinner, including a turkey, all the fixings, decorations, and placemarks. After Bobby leaves to purchase a respectable business suit in which to greet the family, April is responsible for the turkey. However, her previously unused oven turns out to be broken, so she tries to find an oven from someone in the apartment building. One Caucasian male (played by Sean Hayes) agrees, but later insists on sex, so she withdraws the turkey after much fuss. She then turns to a Chinese family, which readily agrees to help; while the turkey is cooking, she tries to explain the American custom of Thanksgiving to the astonished immigrant family, including the mistreatment of Native Americans. She also enlists the help of an African American family (played by Lillias White and Isiah Whitlock, Jr.), to prepare the cranberry sauce. When her family arrives at her Lower East Side address, after spouting frustration at April’s past antics en route, they panic because she is apparently living in a slum with a Black boyfriend, who greets them with a cut lip and bleeding left temple from a scuffle a few minutes earlier. Accordingly, they retreat to a restaurant for their Thanksgiving dinner. While pretending to go to the restroom, Joy talks a motorcyclist at the restaurant to drive her back to her daughter’s apartment, whereupon the family agrees to return. The last scenes of the film are without words, depicting a happy Thanksgiving dinner with April and Bobby, her family, the Chinese family, and the African American neighbors. According to Pieces of April, the neighbors of various ethnic groups help out and socialize together in New York. LA’s standoffishness has received its comeuppance. MH |