A quilt often contains a lot of square pieces, and so does How to Make an American Quilt, the movie director Jocelyn Moorhouse and screenwriter Jane Anderson have stitched together from Whitney Otto’s book. A celebration of love, tradition, and the resilience of women that centers on the lifelong bonds between the members of a small-town quHow to Make an American Quilt has a lot of sappy and sanctimonious elements, and it dissolves all too often into a mire of well intentioned goo. But it’s redeemed by lingering moments of truth, beauty and honest sentiment, largely supplied by a dream cast of top-notch actresses.

The movie takes its structure both from its source, a graduate thesis that became a surprise bestseller in 1991, and its subject, the making of a quilt whose theme is “Where Love Resides.” The quilt is intended to commemorate the impending marriage of Finn (Winona Ryder), a graduate student working on a thesis about ritual customs, but Finn isn’t even sure she wants to get married: She’s spending the summer away from her intended (Dermot Mulroney, in a Bill Pullman role) at the home of her grandmother Hy (Ellen Burstyn) and great-aunt Glady Joe (Anne Bancroft) to clear her head. As Finn quizzes the members of their quilting circle—Anna (Maya Angelou), her daughter Marianna (Alfre Woodard), Em (Jean Simmons), Sophia (Lois Smith), and relative newcomer Constance (Kate Nelligan)—she pieces together not just the fabric of their craft but the tapestry of their lives.

If that last sentence sounds drippy, then brother, How to Make an American Quilt is not the movie for you. From the self-conscious poesy of the opening narration, a synthesis of every chick-flick groaner from Steel Magnolias through , you grit your teeth in expectation of the precious eccentrics and fortune-cookie platitudes to come. And come they do. When a character imparts wisdom along the lines of, “When you spend your life kicking yourself, you wind up with a mighty sore backside,” cinematographer Janusz Kaminski swathes her in such a holy glow you’d think that God himself were her gag writer.

Worse, the women’s individual stories are reduced to dog-eared stereotypes—the housewife who smothers her ambitions in an airless marriage, the widow lonely for her husband’s warmth, the free spirit who regrets missing her one chance for true love and stability. In many cases, particularly the early section recounting Hy and Glady Joe’s stormy relationship, the stories get less interesting as they go along: Instead of starting with a character type and fleshing it out with more complex and specific details, screenwriter Anderson takes a peculiar, intriguing individual and whittles her down to a single point. It’s not that there isn’t a nugget of truth buried in some of these clichés; it’s just that there’s not much to the stories beyond that one middling nugget, and these women deserve more. Nevertheless, the script by Anderson (the talented screenwriter who wrote the switchblade-witted script for The Positively True Adventures of the Alleged Texas Cheerleader-Murdering Mom) has its charms, among them an appreciation for strong sexual appetites in older women and conversations that amuse without following that infernal sitcom set-up/punch line formula.

The most memorable moments in How to Make an American Quilt come from the superb cast, which brings dignity and assurance to even the hokiest scenes. The performers supply the details the script often lacks: We learn more about Marianna’s bohemian temperament from the fluid, sensual way Alfre Woodard draws on a cigarette than from the whole vignette of her Parisian life. Although all the actresses have delightful, knowing bits of business, from Maya Angelou’s disapproving appraisal of the unfinished quilt to the proud look Lois Smith gives Winona Ryder at the end, the performance that stays with you most comes from the wondrous Claire Danes, who plays the young Glady Joe. She’s only in a few scenes, but she radiates goodwill, and her motor-mouthed liberal enthusiasm is immediately tonic: She’s like a cross between Lynda Barry’s Marlys and Eleanor Roosevelt.

Ironically, this movie about quilting, in which the whole exceeds the sum of its parts, is more worthwhile for its many fine moments than for its glib summation. What sticks in your mind are the tiny flourishes and images: Claire Danes glancing off the word “ignorami,” a shot of Winona Ryder snuggled up in her big quilt, a plastic lawn chair cartwheeling across a lawn in a high wind (although the symbolic wind itself is a terrible idea). How to Make an American Quilt may be a jumble of threadbare elements, but there’s some beautiful stitching among the rags.—Jim Ridley

Tragic Heroes

The time is the pre-assassination 1960s, but 12-year-old Steven Lidz has uneasy feelings that transcend eras. The protagonist of Diane Keaton’s new film (based loosely on the memoir of the same name by Franz Lidz), Steven swings emotionally between the swagger boys get once they master being a kid and the self-doubt that often muddies the path to adulthood. Confounding Steven further, his mother (played by Andie MacDowell) has become ill, and he misses her daily wisdom and reassurance. In her stead, he leans on his father (John Turturro), an obsessive scientist and sometime inventor, who is too distracted by his devotion to his dying wife to help Steven (Nathan Watt) find his way.

So Steven slips out of his house and seeks the company of his two eccentric uncles, who live together in a cluttered low-rent apartment. Uncle Danny (’s Michael Richards) is a paranoiac, given to long rants about fascist spies and anti-Semites conspiring against him. Uncle Arthur (Maury Chaykin) is a pack rat who spends his days collecting and sorting the memories that others throw away. From this bent twosome, Steven learns both to value history and to fear it. He uncovers the jagged patterns of his family’s past, inspired by the grandmother he never knew. And he discovers that, as Uncle Danny puts it, “people can get trapped in their history,” creating a persona that borders on mania.

is a first-rate coming-of-age film, in the same class as King of the Hill and My Life As a Dog. It’s an engaging, entertaining movie, and though the specter of death looms constantly in the background, the tone is more lively than maudlin. Richard LaGravenese’s screenplay is mercifully free of speechmaking: The dialogue springs from characters who define themselves by the force of their words—they speak words more for their rhythm and texture than for what they mean.

It helps that director Keaton is herself a bit of a pack rat, inclined to let her camera linger over old lipsticks, stacks of newspapers, rubber balls recovered from sewers, and other grubby, discarded objects. The placement of this arcana in the film’s warm, nut-brown color scheme gives a nostalgic tone that some (including fans of Lidz’s memoir and Lidz himself) have criticized as overly sentimental. But Keaton’s images are far from cuddly: A scene of home movies projected over a casket is at once beautiful and devastatingly sad, as is the emphasis on MacDowell’s ever-present cigarette, which produces a smoky shroud around her head. This dour evocation of doom is as essential to Keaton’s memory play as old 78s and quirky inventions.

MacDowell (who has ruined more films in her career than she has graced) is surprisingly good here, exuding a melancholy selflessness that pulls the viewer close. It’s easy to see why both Steven and his father adore her. For their part, Turturro, Richards and Chaykin create a loose fraternalism accented by the actors’ unusual curves and angles.

The real star of the film, though, may be composer Thomas Newman, whose vibe-laden score provides the narrative with palpable suspense. As he did in Little Women and The Shawshank Redemption, Newman forgoes predictable period touches, searching instead for sounds that reach to a story’s . In , the simple play of flute and strings bespeaks a sadness that the characters have difficulty expressing, and the haunting echo of the vibes reminds the viewer that all period films are in some ways mysteries—a way of finding the truths of the past that