Carve a Turkey into two

Thanksgiving is movies to me, like everything else, and the best are the ones that remind us of why we're American, since the movies are the best thing this Country has produced, aside from rock n' roll, and we just sort of own them, so "Hurrah for Hollywood!" My favorite Thanksgiving movie is "Alice's Restaurant," from the late Sixties, around when I was born, and I guess speaks to where I'm really from, more than where I came to, and I don't mean that as pithy nostalgia, but that movie was really my idea of what Thanksgiving could be. For starters, the holiday is free of the religious constraints of Xmas and Easter, or the ultra-patriotic fervor of the 4th of July. It's a holiday free of much, save it's one of the most important of the year, and a time for loved ones getting together. The folk epic "Alice's Restaurant," by Arlo Guthrie, a talking blues in the tradition of his dust bowl balladeer Father, Woody Guthrie, one of the greats, yet modernizing it for the next generation, so Arlo became something Woody could never imagine, a hippy rebel, instead of a socialist, somehow advanced to the point where politics no longer mattered, though their feelings on the world coming together in a brotherhood against the ruling class was very much the same. Arlo was just a lot richer than Woody, with much more privilege, and why he was sitting at a table all alone half-naked with a bib on, mocking and homaging the ruling class that became America, and in some strange way Arlo Guthrie stands for Thanksgiving for me.

I think "Alice's Restaurant," really tried to reinvent the idea of Thanksgiving, or giving thanks, and instead of spending it with your family, if you spent it with your friends, it could be the best day of the year, even better than the 4th of July, because you'd be stealing a holiday in a sense from the old order, and reinventing a tradition. In the movie by Arthur Penn, the one he may have made after Bonnie and Clyde, the commune is presented, and this is where the movie is really brilliant and unforgettable, but let me take a breath to explain. I think there were a lot of lessons from the Sixties that were contradictory; there was the Manson Family that is mostly seen as evil, but yet romanticized, and even by people like me (yes, ME!), and then there were 'Bonnie and Clyde' themselves, killers, but romantic heroes at the same time, and somehow embodying the mythic Sixties anti-hero. There really aren't any anti-heroes in "Alice's Restaurant," and yet it forces you to take on an almost anti-romantic posture that ultimately reeks of romanticism, just like Manson somehow ultimately reeks of rock n' roll heroism, because the movie isn't about success but failure, and the failure is of a beautiful dream that a bunch of people got together, decided to live communally for the sake of art, and were ultimately taken down by forces greater than their control. Make no mistake about it, "Alice's Restaurant," is a very sad movie that the studios tried to sell as a hippie celebration of love and life, but I don't think anyone who has ever seen it would come to that conclusion, whether you liked it or not. Along with "Easy Rider," it's one of the great studies into why the Sixties "blew it," and if a video store were open right now I'd go rent it, because it's timeless; it's a sad recitation on the failure of a beautiful dream, made all the more tragic, because the movie is light, and has a 15 minute 'video' montage of Arlo's folk tale about taking the garbage out on Thanksgiving, and almost going to jail, expressing the absurdity of our society with such clarity it made sense that Woody Guthrie was his Father but a son to make Daddy proud.

The greatest Thanksgiving movie of the last twenty years, and I don't think I'm exaggerating, is "Pieces of April," so... "Pieces of April," and "Alice's Restaurant," would just make a devastating double feature, since they are both about Thanksgiving in the Northeast, and both paint a larger than life generational meltdown, because there's no doubt that the holiday's make us think of family and friends. In "Alice's Restaurant" Arthur Penn all but murders the idea of the commune, by taking the most idealistic funky hippie vision of converting a Church into a Hippie love shack, with only the best intentions, the new Church, and they have a core group living there, including Arlo Guthrie, but Ray and Alice start crumbling under the pressure (great performances by James Broderick, and Pat Quinn, and if you can believe this Quinn doesn't even have a Wikipedia page, and yet she starred in a major movie, and gave a dynamite performance, in her big black boots, and all loving nature, that was broken inside. James Broderick was the father on "Family," one of my all time favorite soapy family dramas.

"Pieces of April," was literally broken in the very title by the implications of the word 'pieces' and the name April is out of season with Thanksgiving. I saw this movie with my girlfriend and both of us came out from it very emotionally affected in a self-reflective way; we come from fractured families, and I don't mean to embarrass her by saying this, or putting us on the spot, but the movie hit close to the bone of how we were living. "Pieces of April," takes place in the East Village, and has my favorite Katie Holmes and Patricia Clarkson performances, as the Mother and Daughter, that just don't know each other, either economically, spiritually, or emotionally, and Clarkson is dying of cancer, and it makes the meeting all the more loaded, but it's not corny. It's a very real movie in real time about a family breaking down over a turkey.

The movies generally gloss over Thanksgiving and go right to Christmas, making the X-Mas movie a national pastime, requiring its own classification. I think that's because the first generation immigrants from Mexico, Europe, Africa, Asia, Japan, or China, just don't seem to understand Thanksgiving, and I don't blame them for this in the least. It's a very uniquely American holiday, created in the Northeast, and why I think the movies that best reflect Thanksgiving take place there, but the only other one that comes to mind is "The Big Chill," and this may not have been exactly Thanksgiving but was awfully close, because they were playing football on the lawn at half time while watching the Ohio State/Michigan game, a great gridiron tradition, but in the Northern mid-west, with the leaves scattered on the ground.

When I was nineteen, I thought that Thanksgiving was my holiday, everyone else be damned, and that it was for me to own, so I owned it, with a kind of beautiful youthful reckless freedom, that I showed from time to time, thinking I could give the finger to my family, and reinvent Thanksgiving, like they did in "Alice's Restaurant," and that's a weird thing to say, because the movie ends in disaster, but I guess the vision was so beautiful, that those parts linger in the memory too, creating a mixed picture of an event, kind of like a childhood invariably is to the siblings that lived it, though I used to think otherwise, but I was very naive.

In my mind, "Ordinary People" will always take place at Thanksgiving, because it may with the Grandparents coming over and wondering if Conrad's shrink is Jewish or not. I was on the set of "Ordinary People" because my next door neighbor was working on the movie, and our families met for the holiday. They were shooting the movie on location in a northern suburb of Chicago, and I went through a transformative experience there that ended with me seeing the set that Michael was in charge of designing. The set reflected my life that was breaking down, so that movie might be in the running but Thanksgiving might just be the beginning, leading to Xmas. But again it's an emotionally difficult movie, like the Thanksgiving ones almost always are, perhaps due to the shady circumstances that had the pioneers cheating the Indians, and though I hate to put it so bluntly, it kind of ranks right there with Columbus Day, and yet both are marked in the memory, with joyous resolution, in spite of their mixed message, wishing a Country well.