How to Make an American Quilt

National Catholic Reporter, Nov 10, 1995 by Joseph Cunneen

I went to "How to Make an American Quilt" (Universal) after reading rave quotations from advance reviews and expecting to praise it as a delightfUl alternative to "Get Shorty." The idea of a sewing circle of older women coming together to make a lovely wedding present for a younger one seemed to hold lyrical possibilities. Since Maya Angelou as Anna presided over the group as the one who knew the most about quilting, I hoped for an unusual level of insight.

How could a movie with such accomplished actresses as Anne Bancroft, Ellen Burstyn, Jean Simmons, Alfre Woodard, Lois Smith and Winona Ryder fail to get me emotionally involved?

Unfortunately, the material -- adapted by Jane Anderson from a master's thesis by Whitney Otto that became a surprise bestseller -- remains more an idea than a real story. The audience doesn't get a chance to know these women.

Anderson changes the original, hoping to give "Quilt" a narrative spine by centering it on Finn (Winona Ryder), who is spending her summer in rural California with her grandmother Hy (Ellen Burstyn) and great-aunt Glady Joe (Anne Bancroft), while writing her dissertation and thinking over her upcoming marriage to Sam (Dermot Mulroney).

It doesn't work. The older women's experiences with men, told in awkwardly melodramatic flashbacks, make Finn, whose parents have long been divorced, even more worried about making a commitment. Besides, she seems much too self-preoccupied to profit much from whatever wisdom her seniors may have acquired.

The flashbacks -- presumably stories that will enlighten Finn -- seem to insist on emotional responses the material doesn't earn. In one embarrassing sequence, Hy, distraught at the hospital bedside of her dying husband, phones her sister's husband (Rip Torn) to drive her home, leaves the car to lie under a tree and grabs her brother-in-law in her agony of emotional need.

The situation is extreme but, handled with more subtlety, could have won sympathetic understanding. Instead, director Jocelyn Moorhouse cuts to the return home, Glady Joe's sudden recognition that her husband and sisters have "betrayed" her and endless shots of Glady Joe destroying her pottery in a wild rage.

Even harder to understand is why Maya Angelou participated in the project. As Anna, she looks wonderfully matriarchal and has some good lines on the meaning of quilting, but her flashback trivializes the slavery background of her character's grandparents and makes her seduction as a young woman by a callow white man seem like casual frivolity.

Women of even mildly feminist conviction will be even more disappointed with "Quilt" than I was. It may be credible to present the experience of an earlier generation of women as entirely centered on their husbands, but the picture seems to approve this older perspective. If "Quilt" had convinced us that these were real women, they would have gained our sympathy. Anna's final counsel is pretty lame: "You have to go by instinct and you have to be brave."

Although most older women had fewer options, they were and are a good deal more complex and feisty than "Quilt" suggests. Go to a discriminating video store and seek out the low-budget Canadian movie of a few years back, "Strangers in Good Company," and see how emotionally compelling a quiet time with such a group of women can be when their experience is rendered more simply and poetically.