Well, April isn’t a love story, but it sure as hell isn’t as light-hearted and kooky as the previews make it out to be. Maybe this is a case of my mood coloring my viewing, but I left it with a lingering sadness that the rather forced happy ending couldn’t dispel. It is funny most of the time, though – in fact, it plays more like a sitcom than an independent film, a little too canned and punchline-conscious.
It plays like The Daytrippers meets Home for the Holidays. April (Katie Holmes) is the black sheep of the Burns family, now living in New York with her boyfriend. She’s invited the family to Thanksgiving dinner at her place, apparently after a long period of estrangement, but runs into somewhat greater-than-expected hurdles making it. When you meet the family, you get why she fled – wildly misnamed mother Joy (Patricia Clarkson) is nasty and petulant, although it’s a touch more understandable when you find out that she’s dying and her cruelty seems more like a defense mechanism as she tries to hold herself together; sister Beth is an insufferable goody-two-shoes, sort of an über-hall monitor; brother Timmy is a scatterbrained slacker who seems inoffensive only because he generally keeps his mouth shut. Even the relentlessly avuncular father (Oliver Platt) can’t seem to muster up much affection for his prodigal daughter.
One scene that gets a great response in the previews is when the family, driving with a sense of coercion to the city, tries to remember good things about April. Every memory either parent comes up with is swatted down by Beth, indignantly shouting, “That was me!” It’s played for laughs, and it is funny (all the actors have great, if somewhat sitcom-y, comic timing), but I couldn’t help thinking how horribly sad it was, too. They can’t think of one good memory about their own child, they spend the entire drive bitching about how dreadful they expect the experience to be and how much they don’t want to see that screw-up April again, and meanwhile, she’s driving herself to distraction frantically trying to get the dinner ready and obsessing over little touches like place cards. It breaks your heart, and the requisite happy ending feels hollow.
Holmes is very good, letting an affecting vulnerability peek out from under her defensive veneer of cool sarcasm, and the actors who play the neighbors she beseeches for help – especially Sean Hayes, Lillias White, and Isiah Whitlock, Jr. -- are hilarious. Derek Luke as her boyfriend is also good, though it’s annoying that the film goes to great pains to mislead us as to his true nature and the reason for his enigmatic “errand” that takes him away from April’s dinner prep. I wish Oliver Platt had a little more to do; I always enjoy him, but here he barely registers.
As a dysfunctional-family holiday film, April can’t touch Home for the Holidays (not a great movie, but one with a truer emotional resonance for many of us about the ambivalence of family gatherings – I still remember coming out of the theater after seeing it, and one of my friends, pathologically upbeat, said he didn’t like it “because families like that don’t really exist,” and another friend and I replied simultaneously, “Come to my house for Thanksgiving!”) nor even The Ref (my favorite Christmas film). It’s good enough entertainment, but the sour taste of the family feuding makes the comedy a little hard to swallow.
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