The Task: Watch and write about every movie on my shelf, in order (Blu-rays are sorted after DVDs), by June 10, 2015. Remaining movies: 229 Days to go: 234
Movie #148: How to Make an American Quilt
Finn (Winona Ryder) is the worst. She’s the worst of the worst. And as wonderful as How to Make an American Quilt is, one of the best parts is how all the other ladies repeatedly call Finn on her bullshit.
Finn is engaged to Sam (Dermot Mulroney), but she needs “space” from him. Ostensibly, this is space to finish her Masters thesis — the latest in a series of Masters theses she has worked passionately on before discarding — but Finn is simply someone, as she herself notices with regard to her multiple theses, who no longer wants something once she gets it. “Whenever I’m about to finish, I decide to switch topics. I can’t help it. It seems the more I know about something, well, the less I wanna know about it.” She is never satisfied and never accountable. And she blames all of this — or at least the lion’s share of it — on her parents’ failed marriage and her mother’s breezy, noncommittal attitude toward romantic entanglements. Being someone, myself, who has, in the past, blamed a lot of her bullshit on any number of outside factors, I feel entirely justified in calling Finn out in this same manner. She is a flighty young woman, full of excuses and quasi-intellectual justifications for her attitudes, her opinions and her behaviors, and I really hate her. (Perhaps because I was her at one time, and I will own that.)
As much as I detest Finn, though, I really appreciate how three-dimensional she is as a character — how three-dimensional all the women in the film are. These women have strengths and weaknesses, past triumphs and long-held regrets. They’ve made brave choices and they’ve made mistakes, and they all have different outlooks on life and on love.
The plot of the film follows Finn as she seeks “space” from Sam to finish her thesis by spending the summer with her grandmother Hy (Ellen Burstyn) and Hy’s sister Glady Joe (Anne Bancroft), who have lived together in Glady Joe’s house since their husbands passed. The sisters are members of a quilting circle, led by the commanding Anna (Maya Angelou), who have come together to sew Finn’s wedding quilt, the theme of which is “Where Love Resides.” Each of the women have a different patch to sew to illustrate where love resides for them, and Finn visits each of their stories, told in flashback. She learns of loves lost, loves wasted, loves held together throughout time. She hears of great loves and loves that never were, and all these stories eventually give her insight into her own story and her own love life, her future.
There is the love of sisters, a strong bond that survives pain and loss and betrayal. There’s the love a mother has for her daughter, more solid and stronger than any bond she could have for the man who fathered that baby. There’s the love of excitement, the love of consistency, the love of someone who touches your soul the way no one else can. And there’s the love of a long-lost memory that no longer exists at all, as well as a love once lost that is found again. All these loves shape and mold Finn’s summer. First she uses them as an excuse to stray from Sam into the arms of sexy but horrible Leon (Johnathon Schaech), then she uses them to find her way back to him, and her story becomes yet another story of the quilt, built into the fabric, stitched together with shared experiences and emotions.
Sophia’s story, played out in the present by Lois Smith and in the past by Samantha Mathis, is perhaps my favorite and perhaps the saddest, though all the tales have aspects of joy and sorrow in them, be they Marianna’s (Alfre Woodard) one true love who she only met for one night and never got a picture of, or Em’s (Jean Simmons in the present and Joanna Going in the past) philandering husband whose “artistic” temperament both exhilarated and frustrated her throughout their marriage.
Kate Capshaw does a fine job in a small role as Finn’s mother, flitting into the picture to throw another wrench on Finn’s ideas of love and marriage, then chastising Finn for taking so much stock in what she has to say. She really brings home the idea of love being something that you’re maybe always figuring out and that it’s not a bad thing, it’s just what it is. Nobody’s perfect.
And Claire Danes is frankly hilarious as a young Glady Joe, whether she’s fighting with young Hyacinth (Roseanne‘s original Becky Alicia Goranson) or trying to talk intellectually with young Anna (Maria Celedonio) about racism and slavery.
I find myself somewhat unsatisfied by the ending of the movie, every time, in part because Finn is dragging her gorgeous new quilt through the dirt as she follows a crow, but also because I’m still not convinced Finn is ready to commit herself to Sam. But I do, however, feel like she could get there eventually, that maybe in ten years, the Finn who was 26 and flaky matures into a Finn who is 36 and comfortable and self-assured. Whatever happens, though, will become part of her story, part of who she is, just as their histories have shaped the lives and hearts of these women, these quilters. Just as my history has shaped me.
I was unhappy and unsatisfied at 26 too, but it’s more than ten years later and I feel so much more aware of who I am and what I want. I haven’t forgotten my past, but I definitely feel like I’ve learned from it, that I’m still learning from it. Ultimately, we’re all still learning.
“Young lovers seek perfection.
Old lovers learn the art
Of sewing shreds together
And of seeing beauty
In a multiplicity of patches.”
Viable Option 