How to Make an American Quilt

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.

Love, development and maturity all form the embroidery for this "more than a Hollywood drama piece" quilt, with stitching that matches the craftily, skilfully and fruitfully detailed needlework. From the needle of a great, star-laden ensemble, the patterns have been carefully but imaginatively sown into the wool - from a powerful exploration of human relationships to the torture of love, the journeys of women and the revelations of grief and new beginnings - there are many materials and colours used to form this quilt, and there is something that will appeal to everyone. Just like an American quilt, you too seem to become apart of the amazing, cathartic story lines, which weave together to make this cinematic masterpiece. It is evident that the embroiderer clearly knows how to make an American Quilt!

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.

Bride-to-be Finn Dodd (Winona Ryder) hears tales of romance and sorrow from her elders as they construct a quilt.

Is this a chick flick or something more? I think it is primarily a chick flick, as it tells multiple romance stories from the point of view of the ladies. But it is not a romantic comedy, which makes it deeper than the average chick flick. And the cast... wow. Winona Ryder, Maya Angelou, Claire Danes and the debut of Jared Leto? That has to make it worth something.

And actually, it was the cast that really made this enjoyable for me. I cared very little about the plot, and definitely did not care about the romances. Finn could be with her boyfriend, a foreign guy or whoever. I don't care who she picks. But the casting was excellent.