LEFTOVER LIVES

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

Men stray from domesticity and tend to die prematurely. Women are victimized by both of these predilections and devote their leftover lives to regrets, resentments and needlework.

That's pretty much the message of How to Make an American Quilt, as received by Finn (Winona Ryder), a graduate student who spends a small-town summer with her grandmother and aunt (Ellen Burstyn and Anne Bancroft), working on her thesis and getting her head together. As things work out, she seems to devote most of her time to gathering instructive reminiscences from them and the rest of the ladies in their quilting bee. They are neither so genteel nor stridently feminist as you might fear.

The mood of this adaptation of Whitney Otto's novel by writer Jane Anderson and director Jocelyn Moorhouse is sweetly subversive. It usefully insists that beneath the placid surface of middle-class life strong currents rush and eddy, carrying everyone in directions utterly unpredictable when they are young and sure of themselves. And if it doesn't provide fully developed roles for them, it does evenhandedly offer a lot of underutilized actresses (among them Jean Simmons, Lois Smith and Kate Nelligan and the poet Maya Angelou) a moment or two to remind us how good they are.

There's something abrupt about the way these ladies are brought forward one by one to tell their often archetypal tales of dreams betrayed. But there's also a nice tartness, a lack of self-pity, in their telling. Quilt is a patchwork, but when it's finally stitched together, one sees a certain artless intricacy in its design, a certain glow in its blend of colors.