This month, two of Clarkson’s Sundance entries finally arrive at an art-house theater near you. The first, “The Station Agent,” is a sweet wisp of a movie about a train-obsessed dwarf, in which she plays a woman coping with the accidental death of her son. Clarkson is good–“I get to play the chick!”–but in “Pieces of April,” starring Katie Holmes as a black-sheep daughter trying (and mostly failing) to host Thanksgiving, she’s downright unforgettable. As Joy, a mother with terminal breast cancer, Clarkson is cruel, bitter–and mordantly, marvelously funny. To shoot a handful of scenes on the road to April’s dumpy Manhattan apartment, the actress had to get cozy in some of New Jersey’s most elegant rest stops. “Let me tell you, those were real bathrooms in real gas stations. It was brutal,” she says. “Ah, the perks!” Nights spent at a HoJo, days spent at a Mobil station–yes, it’s good to be the queen.
