Le patchwork de la vie

I have spent many pleasant hours mocking "How To Make An American Quilt" to friends, but at this moment I want to play fair. I'm sure that there are many things to like about this movie and that somehow they escaped my notice. For me it was never more than a series of plot devices stitched together (ha ha) to form an unsatisfying story.

Winona Ryder is always a pleasure to watch. I've liked her better in more irreverent titles like "Beetlejuice" or "Heathers". Still, she wears earnestness well, and manages to make bearable the Poloniusesque quilt speech at end of the picture (see the quotes section).

The supporting players should be every bit as watchable (with several centuries of acting experience among them, they ought to be). I wish I'd been allowed to watch them act. Their function was to sit in front of the camera quilting and say a few words of introduction before the flashback--as if they were hosts of a documentary.

I want to pause for a moment over Maya Angelou's casting. It's always a tricky thing introducing a famous person from another discipline as an actor. I call it the "Hey, you're Kareem Abdul-Jabbar" problem (based on the scene from _Airplane_ where a kid recognizes the basketball player in the co-pilot's seat. The joke is in how much time he spends denying it). Maya Angelou has screen presence, but does nothing to dispel the problem. My dominant experience watching her was, "Wow, they got Maya Angelou, world famous poet!" Maybe this was the idea. Maybe the filmmakers felt her famous presence would, in itself, add depth to the proceedings, so why muddy it with anything as messy as an interesting character? Her appearance was less acting than promotion. Maya Angelou wouldn't appear in a dog, would she?

Well...

The plot reminds me of a line Robin Williams had about alcoholics, "You realize you're and alcoholic when you repeat yourself. You realize you're an alcoholic when you repeat yourself. You realize, oh dammit." Each woman's story follows a similar pattern. Girl meets boy, sleeps with boy, marries boy, boy leaves, boy comes back--each time unconvincingly (I wonder how far any guy has ever gotten with the opening line "You swim like a mermaid"). The Alfre Woodard story is the only variation, and as a result, the only interesting one among them.

And of course Winona Ryder's Finn has a similar problem. Does she marry Dermott Mulrooney or does she go off with the local stud muffin. I call him the local stud muffin because that's all he is. The actor who played him didn't convince me that there was anything under the perfect I-don't-have-to-work-out abs that would compel her to do more than roll in the field with him. He wasn't a character so much a plot device meant to set up an obvious choice. Handsome rogue or dependable architecht? Given the way the flashbacks ran, take a guess.

There are more scenes to pummel here. There's the thesis blowing away in the wind (she's the only grad student I've ever seen with no notes, no paperweight, and, since she was using a typewriter, no carbons), and there's her random meeting with the Stud Muffin (who just happened to be hanging out in the groves with a picnic basket and a blanket for her. I guess this was set before the advent of stalking laws), but it would take too long to mock them all. The real trouble with the movie is that it was so earnest, so desperate to convince the audience of its poetic depths, that it wound up shallow, unsatisfying, unconvincing and unintentionally funny.

Or, to put it another way--never have so many, who were so talented, worked on something so ordinary.

When Berkeley graduate student Finn decides to spend some time away from her live-in boyfriend, and moves in with her grandmother and great aunt for the summer, while finishing her master's thesis, she gets an important and heart-warming lesson about love and commitment. Finn's grandmother and great aunt are members of a quilting bee, and their group (whose members have known each other for a long time) decide that their latest project should have the theme of "where love resides." As the quilt is made, each woman remembers significant events in their lives which relate to love and the joy and pain that it brings. Each woman brings her own perspective to the nature of love, from Anna (who signs off on men completely after a bad experience)to her daughter Marianne (who cannot settle on just one man). Some of the women have been cheated on, some have done the cheating, while others just let love die.

Along the way, Finn faces temptation in the form of Leon, a smoldering hunk who pursues her in spite of knowing that she is taken. At the same time, Finn must come to terms with her parents' failed marriage, as she decides whether to accept her boyfriend's marriage proposal.

Inspite of the pains that the women have suffered in the name of love, the movie does not in any way bash love or marriage (which has recently become popular). It is a beautifully made film, and while it is definitely a "chick flick," it might also appeal to the more romantically minded guy.

There are only two reasons to watch this film: Winona Ryder's wonderful (as usual) performance, and Janusz Kaminski's spectacular cinematography.

Ryder breathes life into Finn Dodd, portraying her as a charming, intelligent, and highly sensitive young woman struggling to define what love and commitment mean to her. Ryder is one of those few actresses who is able to relay a world of meaning in just her facial expressions alone. She's mesmerizing to watch onscreen.

Added to Ryder's enchanting performance is Academy Award winning cinematographer Janusz Kaminski's beautiful, flowing images. There are many tiresome flashback sequences in this film, but they are all worth seeing just for the artistic value of the photography. Kaminski makes wonderful use of fluid camera movements and grainy filters to capture the essence of each time and place portrayed. It's no wonder Kaminski won an Academy Award for his work in Schindler's List and will most likely win another for Saving Private Ryan.

Other than these elements, this film has very little going for it. The screenplay is muddled and jumpy, and there are far too many characters with far too many inconsequential flashback sequences that say very little about the nature of either love or commitment. The story concerns nothing more than a bunch of old women sharing completely one-sided and sexist sob stories. Like The Joy Luck Club and Waiting to Exhale, this film portrays men as little more than duplicitous, moronic, emotionally immature children who are incapable of either expressing true love or loyalty. It is a completely shallow look at adult human relationships and has nothing new or profound to say about anything.

As a male supporter of feminism and feminist artistic expression, it saddens me that films like this are, first of all, even made, and then marketed as movies that modern women should see and even cherish. There are many far better films about women and their unique experiences, the most recent one being a small film called High Art, written and directed by Lisa Cholodenko and starring Ally Sheedy in one of 1998's best performances.

This movie tells about men and women, and ties that bind them (us, I mean).

I haven't read the novel, and I'm the kind of person who believes that the movie is not to be compared with any novel who based it, because they're using different media. So the way I see it, it's a good movie. We can easily understand it's messages and sympathy with the characters.

Winona, by the way, appears to be a sweet girl who's having trouble following her 'advisors' ideas and wisdom. On the screen, she appears to be having quite difficulty matching these women's acts. We see her the way she is in 'Edward Scissorhand', or 'Reality Bites', or her other movies. Maybe because she's so sweet and pretty, and I was carried away with her big eyes. So I see her in this movie very usual and not special.

The movie itself is beautiful and sweet. The casts are nice. We ended up wondering about our relationships and ourselves.

A must see. Watch it with your close friends, spouse, or parents.

The thing with American Quilt, which you will especially notice if you have already read the book, is that it has a lot of contents to deal with in the ranges of a feature film. But Jocelyn Moorehouse obviously wanted to pack all the magic of the small stories of the women into this film, she wanted an entire quilt, full of bits and parts. It is only when understanding this that one can fully appreciate this wonderful piece. Fynn, escaping her partner and the life (marriage) probably unfolding before her, stays with her grandmother and -aunt for the summer. The serious young eccentric, a worried, messed-up hippie girl, confronts her future, her past and her present (dealing with gorgeous Johnathon Schaech chasing her with smiles and strawberries), when she dives into the life- and love stories told to her by the women in her grandmother´s quilting circle. The rest is magic. See the torture of love, the journeys of women and the revelations of grief and new beginnings, see what they hold dear, what will always stay with them, and learn what Fynn eventually comes to terms with: That life is not about perfection, it´s about balance, about putting the small things together, just like a quilt. So, okay, mechanically, Moorhouse really doesn´t have enough time for subtlety, and some characters and developments literally just fly by without any diving in. This will lead people to saying it´s superficial, but it´s not: It´s a journey, like looking out of a car window in another country: Just peeks. Bits. Parts. Parts of a quilt the movie leaves you to put together. If you do, like I did, it´s so moving and inspiring. Warm. The music of THE one-and-only Thomas Newman, the beautiful Winona Ryder, the charismatic ladies, the land, full of secrets and peace. This is what makes it special. Fast, but special. And the final highpoint, a literal "storm" that blows everything apart yet puts everything together, is a cinematic masterpiece, proof of heartfelt, imaginative work of both the writer and the director. They´re actually dreaming an ending together - just take this lovely movie in and stop bickering about reality. If you ask me.