A family’s black sheep offers to host Thanksgiving at her apartment. The shaky gesture spurs the plot of writer-director Peter Hedges’ Pieces of April (2003), a movie that for the better refrains from the kinds of Oscar-clip-baiting scenes — noisy, confrontational ones where years of pent-up resentment come to the fore, usually at a climactic juncture — for which dramas of its ilk have a weakness.

Pieces of April subversively wraps up just as its plot-motivating gathering is beginning, opting to depict its long-awaited reunion not through dramatization but a series of grainy polaroids. Its narrative is bifurcated before it achieves a certain unity in those final moments. On one side are scenes at the eponymous character’s (Katie Holmes) cramped Lower East Side one-bedroom, where she and her boyfriend Bobby (Derek Luke) frantically prepare the evening’s feast, weathering such obstacles as a dropped turkey and a tuckered-out oven that requires some eleventh-hour knocks on neighboring apartment doors. On the other are glimpses of her family’s drive over, which will at one point see their car tone-settingly plow down a raccoon and at another stop by Krispy Kreme just in case April’s cooking turns out not to be very edible.

Everybody’s trying to be as accommodating as possible to matriarch Joy (an excellent, salt-dry Patricia Clarkson), who’s recently been diagnosed with breast cancer and is not expected to survive. Withering and sardonic, Joy isn’t one to very easily absorb her family’s worried coddling; she doesn’t seem like she was much of a doting-mother type before her terminal diagnosis, either. It’s telling when she makes herself laugh by abruptly demanding her husband, Jim (Oliver Platt), pull over mid-drive, convincing her freaked-out family members that she’s having a medical episode, then clears the air by sarcastically asking everyone how they’re going to discreetly dispose of the food they’re going to politely pretend to enjoy.

Hedges doesn’t harp on the reasons for the family’s practical banishment of April, who isn’t confident they’ll even come. Much of that can be superficially inferred just from her edgy, crimson-red-haired goth-girl style — a 180 compared to, with the exception of her stoner little brother (John Gallagher, Jr.), her relatives’ suburban look — before more explicit allusions are made to onetime-good-girl April going bad and making it so that no one believes her apologies anymore. (April not being able to do anything right is encapsulated by her unbearably uptight sister, played by Alison Pill, considering April’s hosting selfish, because it’s rude to make everyone drive over.) This is more of a movie about how time-worn family dynamics, which in Pieces of April feel lived-in, can be suddenly thrown into disarray when someone gets sick — how quickly grievances can seem silly when the amount of time to let them fester no longer seems almost comfortingly limitless.

Pieces of April’s cast doesn’t resort to the style of big-gestured acting that often befalls the family drama. (It has different gaucheries, like a side plot finding Bobby venturing out to suit shop that seems mostly to be in the movie to kill time.) Things mostly stay understated and minor-key — a film equivalent of trying not to emotionally break down, working strenuously to keep moving forward when all you want to do is dwell in the past and when things, even the contempt in one’s heart, were more certain. The ending’s use of pictures in lieu of conventional drama, paired with Tami Reiker’s restless, handheld cinematography, gives the movie the feeling of the kind of media with which the family unit is closely associated: the scrapbook; the home video. Both make things seem more special, worth cherishing, than they did in the moment.