How To Make An American Quilt

As Bruce Beresford did with Driving Miss Daisy (1989) Australian director Jocelyn Moorhouse took on a exemplary mainstream American project with How To Make An American Quilt and delivers it with impressive skill. The trouble is that, unlike Beresford’s Oscar-winning film, its script, by Jane Anderson from a novel by Whitney Otto, so wallows in gauzily nostalgic homespun wisdom that Moorhouse’s soft-focussed obligingness nearly sinks it in a sea of sentimentality

Winona Ryder plays Finn, a Berkeley post-grad student who  returns to her family's ancestral home to spend a last summer there before her impending marriage.  Here Finn's grandmother (Ellen Burstyn) and her great aunt (Anne Bancroft) gather with a group of friends (Maya Angelou, Lois Smith, Kate Nelligan, Jean Simmons, Alfre Woodard) are assembled to make Finn's wedding quilt. Each woman’s story becomes part of Finn’s struggle to decide what she should be doing with her life.

The title of the film pretty much tells you everything to expect:  a) it is of, for and by women (all the men are essentially penises) and b) the "American” quilt serves as the symbolic analogue of the film’s moral, that we are all part of a patchwork of stories fashioned into a whole under the guidance some grey-haired godess (or some variation on that).  

It’s sweetly reassuring, flutteringly romantic, politically correct and prettily packaged fare that demands little of its top-drawer cast or audience other than forbearance.

 

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