Katie Holmes as April

We are always part of a family, no matter what role it has played in our lives. Certain occasions, most especially holidays, bring up vivid memories, fugitive feelings, fond moments, and enduring grievances. This theme is creatively explored in Peter Hedges' film Pieces of April.

It's Thanksgiving Day, and April is preparing a feast for her entire family. What is so unusual about that? Well, she's always had a terrible relationship with her mother, Joy, and now the woman is dying of cancer. As April imagines a disaster scenario, it begins to unfold through a series of minor catastrophes connected with the cooking of the turkey. Her family's journey from suburbia to a grungy urban area is no less riddled with difficulties, tension, and setbacks. The end result is a holiday film like none you have ever seen before.

Hedges leaves plenty of room for us to step into the storyline and assess our own feelings about families, memories, connections with others, gratitude, and more, making this a perfect story for discussion. The film runs 80 minutes and is rated PG-13 for language, sensuality, drug content, and /uploads/features/images of nudity. For our review and a plot synopsis, click here.

1. The Most Powerful Ties

"Other things may change us, but we start and end with the family," Anthony Brandt has written. "The most powerful ties are the ones to the people who gave us birth . . . It hardly seems to matter how many years have passed, how many betrayals there may have been, how much misery in the family. We remain connected, even against our wills."

  • What particular roles do each of the members of the Burns family play — Joy, Jim, April, Beth, Timmy, and Joy's mother? How would you characterize their life together? What outside influences have put pressure on them all?
  • What impact have "the most powerful ties" of family had upon your development over the years? Describe the nature and meaning of your connections with your birth family.

Patricia Clarkson as Joy

2. Emotional Expectations

In Why Mothers and Daughers Can't Be Friends, Victoria Secunda writes: "Tension is demonstrated in how mothers and daughters express — or restrain — their feelings for each other. The contextual and temperamental differences that keep mother and daughter at odds with each other seep into their emotional expectations. History notwithstanding, many daughters feel that no matter what they do, their mothers will remain forever unpleasable."

  • What seems to be at the source of the toxic feelings that April and Joy have for each other? Talk about the ways in which they both set up the Thanksgiving holiday up for disaster by giving in to their emotional expectations.
  • Share the story of an experience where your emotional expectations of an event ruined it for you. What contextual or temperamental differences caused rifts in your relationship with your birth parents? Talk about how you have resolved these issues.

trying to borrow a stove

3. Mutual Interdependence

"If everything is connected to everything else, then everyone is ultimately responsible for everything," Lawrence Kushner asserts in Invisible Lines of Connection. "We can blame nothing on anyone else. The more we comprehend our mutual interdependence, the more we fathom the implications of our most trivial acts. We find ourselves within a luminous organism of sacred responsibility."

  • Try to gauge what your reaction to April might be if she knocked on your door on Thanksgiving morning. Share your responses to the way she is treated by the tired man, the fellow with the nasty mother, the African-American couple, the vegan, and Wayne. What do you think April learns in these encounters with her neighbors?
  • What recent experience has brought home to you your reliance upon others and the need to honor your spiritual connections with them?

Oliver Platt as Jim

4. Breaking Out of the Prison of Suffering

In Naikan, Gregg Krech notes: "Our attention seems to be trapped within the limited boundaries of our suffering. But there is more to life than we are seeing. As we expand our view of life we may find that even within the context of our suffering, compassion, care and support are our close companions. . . . But how often do we make room for gratitude in the midst of our suffering?"

  • Sum up your feelings about Joy and the way she is handling her suffering. Then share your responses to Jim and his constant efforts to put a positive spin on the family outing. Talk about the efforts of Beth and Timmy and Joy's mother to be good caretakers. What scene leads Joy to reverse her attitudes and actions?
  • Has there ever been a time when suffering brought out the angry person and the dark comic in you? How do the expression of these two emotions usually affect your state and the behavior of others? Talk about Krech's statement about the importance of expanding our view of life. How does it apply to your life?

5. Making Memories

In Prayers to Sophia Joyce Rupp recommends a memory practice: "Recall a treasured memory of a loved one. Sip on it mentally and emotionally, like a glass of good red wine. Write the memory down. Place it under a pillow or in your pocket. Touch it often with tenderness."

  • When Joy tries to come up with a good memory about April, she can't do it. When Jim chimes in with a memory of April, it is about his own feeling of tenderness watching her asleep. April tells Bobby a memory of a time when her mother hurt her feelings. What do their memories say about this family?
  • What is the fondest memory you have from your childhood? Do you have any spiritual practices that help you to harvest your memories, both the good and bad ones? Share them with the group. Or try Joyce Rupp's suggestion for making memories.

Derek Luke as Bobby

6. Trails in Our Photographs

"Affirmation, love, need, tenderness, all these clean statements with fuzzy edges, trail in deepening shadows across our photographs as they do across our lives. We can always be sure that within each family photograph there will be some message about birth, affinity, or distance," Julia Hirsch writes in Family Photographs: Content, Meaning and Effect.

  • Talk about your emotional responses to the end of the film and the family photographs that emerge from the Thanksgiving dinner. What do you think April, Bobby, and April' s family will take away as memories of this get-together? What about the other guests?
  • What family traditions do you have for Thanksgiving — such as who carves the turkey, what side dishes you serve, what happens before and after the meal, etc? If you have any family photographs of yourself from this holiday bring them out and talk about what they say to and about you.

7. Helping One Another Shift

"Enlightened society happens one by one," Cynthia Kneen explains in Awake Mind, Open Heart. "You shift. I shift. My neighbor shifts. . . . A mother shifts. A child shifts. A news commentator shifts. A prisoner shifts. A warden shifts. A homeless person shifts. Once you realize this, peacefulness and a deep respect for human beings are natural. The help that's needed is to help each person shift, and as they shift, they help the rest of us shift, too. There is no real recipe, except working with what the world presents from the point of view of basic goodness, compassion, and courage. The key is never to make a separation between your practice and your everyday life."

  • Pieces of April is about the little shifts of behavior and consciousness that signal an openness to personal transformation. How do each of the characters change over the course of the story? With which character do most identify?
  • When have you shifted in your life? Who else shifted at the same time? How does your spiritual practice enable you to stay open to change?

Arriving in an Unexpected Way

This guide is one in a series of more than 200 Values & Visions Guides written by Frederic and Mary Ann Brussat. Text copyright 2003 by Frederic and Mary Ann Brussat. Photos courtesy of United Artists. All photos by Teddy Maki except the one of Patricia Clarkson by Andrew Eccles. This guide is posted as a service to visitors to www.SpiritualityandPractice.com. It may not be photocopied, reprinted, or distributed electronically without permission from Frederic and Mary Ann Brussat. For this permission and for a list of other guides in the Values & Visions series and ordering information, email your name and mailing address to: brussat@spiritualrx.com.