"Once there was this day when everyone realized that they needed each other."

That's why April (Katie Holmes) describes Thanksgiving to a family of inquiring Asian immigrants in 2003's dramatic comedy Pieces of April. I can't think of a better way than this to succinctly describe the holiday, or the movie for that matter.

Pieces has such rich backstory that, while watching it, I was convinced it had to come from a book. Turns out I was wrong, but only sort of wrong. Although Pieces of April was written directly for the screen, writer-director Peter Hedges did used to be a novelist. He penned both the book and the script for What's Eating Gilbert Grape? He translated his love of stimulating characters to the screen with the script he wrote for 2002's About a Boy, and that is just as evident with Pieces, Hedges' directorial debut.

The movie -- I'll refrain from calling the digitally shot title a "film" for the benefit of those sensitive to such semantic distinctions -- follows two parallel story lines. In one, April and her live-in boyfriend Bobby (Antwone Fisher's Derek Luke) frantically scramble to prepare a Thanksgiving feast with little or no kitchen savoir-faire.

Meanwhile, April's family sets out toward April and Bobby's urban digs. We sense immediately there is an elephant in the automobile, however, and soon learn that April's mother, Joy, is afflicted with breast cancer and has been on bad terms with April for years. As the moody Joy, Patricia Clarkson finds the perfect balance, alternatively eliciting pity and frustration in the viewer. Traveling with her are Beth, her sycophantic younger daughter; Dottie, her senile mother; Jim, her husband, the trip's lone advocate; and Timmy, her son whose love of photography and Gilbert Grape-ish mellow detachment suggest that he might be Hedges' surrogate.

While this crew kills time with a Krispy Kreme pit stop and an impromptu roadkill funeral, April's oven abruptly commits suicide. Frazzled, April stalks up and down her apartment building looking for a tenant who will let her turkey occupy his or her oven for the day. This plot device may seem a bit sitcom-ish, but it works incredibly well at both propelling the story toward the looming confrontation between April and her family, providing the film with a bedrock of steady laughter.

Much of that laughter derives from the diversely quirky characters in April's apartment building, the quirkiest of which is Wayne (Sean Hayes). Hayes, better known as Will & Grace's Jack, proves he has more than one comedic note to his repertoire with this hilariously odd portrayal. Gently stroking his small terrier and praising his state-of-the-art oven with absurdly posh English, Wayne seems to suffer from a hysterical case of Bond villain syndrome.

As tensions mount in both story lines, we find ourselves rooting for the reunion that we hope will repair the fractured family. It's rare that a movie can make us care so much about the welfare of a fictional family, but in this movie we do and it's because the performances and script have painted such an utterly convincing portrait of real Americans.

The production -- shot in the shaky, quasi-realistic digital style of Curb Your Enthusiasm -- may seem shoddy at times, but if so, the shoddiness only gives it a charming, first-time-hosting-Thanksgiving intertextuality.

It may not be the best Thanksgiving movie ever (I still love you, The Ice Storm), but it might just be the most accessible.

Almost everybody at your dinner table will be able to find a character they can relate to or a situation at which they can laugh.

And togetherness, after all, is what it's all about.