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
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