A BEAUTIFUL STORY
Celebrated author and talented filmmaker team up to present thoughtful movie
There are two scenes in Michael McGowan's adaptation of Manitoba author Miriam Toews's All My Puny Sorrows that will likely stay with you long after the screening ends.
In one of them, sisters Elf (Sarah Gadon) and Yoli (Alison Pill) are sitting in a room in the psych ward of the hospital where Elf has been admitted after a suicide attempt. Over the course of 10 minutes — an eternity in screen time — the two have a discussion about shame, its harms and benefits, and the way it can help give rise to great art.
From there the conversation slides into anger and recrimination — Yoli feels that Elf has the better life, and should concentrate not on ending it but using it to be a better sister to her. Anger builds, then breaks, leaving a lull, the quietness of seconds passing, and Elf trying to put her depression into words. “When I wake up in the morning I have moments of excruciating hope,” she says. “But the day always darkens.”
It's a microcosm of drama, a little mini-movie in the midst of a larger story that is tinged with the dark hues of a family's history with suicide, but also with lighter moments of grace and even humour.
Which brings us to the second unforgettable scene, a mere minute and a half long, in which Yoli has words with a stranger in the hospital's parking garage, totally losing it, before running into her mother (Mare Winningham) inside the building. The comic coda to said scene is a corker.
All My Puny Sorrows focuses closely on the bond between the sisters — and as luck would have it, the two actors attended the same Toronto schools and knew each other as children.
But it also encompasses the ways that religion tries (and sometimes fails) to provide comfort in times of stress. (The other Toews adaptation of 2022, Sarah Polley's Women Talking, is about members of an isolated Mennonite community trying to reconcile their faith with sexual assaults within the group.)
Then there are the ripples that a suicide causes in a family and a community. In the opening scene we learn that the sisters' father (Donal Logue) killed himself 10 years earlier.
Is it fair to blame Yoli's collapsed marriage and struggling writing career on this action? And if not, isn't it heartless to assume it had no effect at all?
McGowan, whose humane and humanistic stories include Saint Ralph, One Week and Still Mine, has a light touch with his adaptation, letting his actors' expressive faces carry the emotional weight of a scene more than once, and often filling screen and screenplay with references to writers and writing — a pan across a bookshelf, a discussion of the importance of libraries, snatches of poetry by Fernando Pessoa and Samuel Taylor Coleridge.
All My Puny Sorrows is a mature and beautiful story, the union of a celebrated author with a filmmaker in his creative prime. It's ultimately about the way grief sneaks up on us, the way death sneaks up on us and the way, sometimes, life and light sneak up on us. Try to be ready for those moments, it suggests. You can't. But try.