"How to Make an American Quilt" A film review by Linda Lopez McAlister on "The Women's Show" WMNF-FM (88.5), Tampa, FL October 14, 1995 When I first heard about "How to Make an American Quilt" I thought it was a film I really wanted to see and review for this program--all those fine women actors, a plot structure based on a folk art form typically the province of women, a woman director whose previous work I admired. I hoped for a film that built upon the wisdom of women gleaned over their lifetimes and that achieved emotional truth. Alas, I was disappointed in almost all of these hopes. It seems to be a pattern that Australia develops some excellent directors whose successes then catapult them to Hollywood where their previous ability to make taut, economical and emotionally honest films disappears and is replaced with overblown, big-budget, formulaic, sentimental stuff. Jocelyn Moorhouse is just the latest example, Her earlier film "Proof" was a fascinating and complex study of some strange but very believable characters. Her current film "How to Make an American Quilt" is a lax and annoyingly simpleminded study of some fairly ordinary and yet not very believable characters or plot. As virtually every reviewer has pointed out, the plot structure of this film is similar to that of "The Joy Luck Club" in that it is a series of flashbacks telling a younger woman, Finn (Winona Ryder) about occurrences in the earlier lives of a group of older women including her grandmother (Ellyn Burstyn) and great aunt (Anne Bancroft) and the other women who have met together at the house they share for years to make quilts. Finn is going through a summer of decision and crisis, trying to finish a master's thesis on the place of ritual in women's crafts and decide whether she wants to take the step of actually marrying her steady but not very exciting fiancee. She thinks that three months away from him living with these important women in her life will lead her to a conclusion on both scores. So she heads back home to.....well, where? As a native Southern Californian I recognized the general geography but I kept being bothered by the fact that I couldn't place any real town that might looks and feels, in 1995, as this place looks and feels. There might well still be beautiful old Victorian houses nestled among orange groves in the Riverside area--but the towns around there don't look like the one in the film. Towns like that still exist in places like the Imperial or San JoaquinValleys but there the landscapes look different from those in the film. It didn't add up; it didn't seem real. And it wasn't; I stayed through the end of the credits to see where it had been shot and, of course, it was a pastiche of different places patched together and that became my metaphor for this film. It's a filmmaker's made up, hoked up version of women's lives just as it's a hoked up, idealized version of a non-existent place. Another problem I had with the film was the casting in the flashbacks. In almost every one there was some really distracting element that made it hard to relate the younger women in the flashbacks to the older women. In the sequence about the Burstyn and Bancroft characters where they played themselves as thirty or so years younger than they and their characters actually are, the problem was they have a hard time playing that age convincingly any more (the makeup department could have given them more help than it did, I think). The flashbacks to several of the other characters' younger days were unconvincing because you couldn't imagine them aging to look as they now look (especially those who played the Lois Smith and Maya Angelou characters in their youth)--a problem that only intensified with the Jean Simmons character because I remember very well what Jean Simmons looked like when she was young and that made it hard to see the identity between her and the actor who played her as a young woman. The only one who escaped this kind of dilemma was Alfie Woodward because she could still play her character at both ages convincingl since her flashback was only to a few years back. As for Winona Ryder--I think I'm going to make it a rule to see her only in period pieces where the historical context and the directors' firm hands force her to behave as a woman of that period would and forego her own annoying personal mannerisms. Here her performance (and that of Anne Bancroft as well) struck me as self-indulgent, with all of her own characteristic quirks and twitches substituting for--well--acting. Maybe I was just in a bad mood the day I saw this film. But maybe not. There's a film critic who writes for the Philadelphia Inquirer who's often quite feminist in her perceptions who commented that it was the first film she had ever seen where she cried through clenched teeth. After I saw it I knew just what she meant. It does have the ability, at least in places, to evoke emotion. But mostly, the overly sentimental and implausible writing and the not-quite-right-on-target portrayals of the characters made me a bit resentful, so much did I want it to have been a better film. For the WMNF Women's Show this has been Linda Lopez McAlister on Women and Film. Copyright 1995 by Linda Lopez McAlister. All rights reserved. Please do not reprint this review without the permission of the author.