Death is on the mind through All My Puny Sorrows, Michael McGowan’s adaptation of the acclaimed Miriam Toews novel that premiered at the Toronto Film Festival last year. Death as ultimatum, death as release, and the wounds death leaves on the living. It’s not often discussed how suicide can perpetuate itself; that the very trauma of being close to it can evoke suicidal tendencies in others. When someone close cuts their life so short, the why and how may not matter as much as the hole left behind. This may be the case for Elfrieda “Elf” Von Riesen (Sarah Gadon), whose father stepped in front of a train when she was young; but that may also be presumptuous. The only certainty is that she craves death and her family wants her to live.
All My Puny Sorrows is a bleak movie, its’ characters locked in a seemingly endless cycle of depression and trauma -and yet it discusses death and suicide in refreshingly frank ways that cushions a sombre mood. It’s about two sisters who grew up in a Mennonite community but left it as young adults. Now Yolandi “Yoli” (Alison Pill) is a struggling novelist going through a divorce and with a teenage daughter (Amybeth McNulty), while Elf is a celebrated concert pianist. When Elf attempts suicide, it brings Yoli home to Winnipeg. It’s not a pleasant reunion, distressing and aggravating for both. Yoli can’t make sense of it, Elf can’t articulate it, but both desperately need the other to understand their feelings.
For more than one reason, this is a difficult movie. It’s not merely the subject matter but the way in which that subject matter is illustrated that makes it complicated to discuss. The main thing is the precise nature of Elf’s suicidal feelings, which we are told stem from the trauma of her fathers’ death, but aren’t shown exactly how that moment has had this lasting an effect on her, what pain she has to live through with it, and why she is so bent on suicide herself because of it –to the point she turns away any efforts of rehabilitation. It feels like we’re missing important details, are being kept at an arms length from emotionally understanding her. And yet, there’s every chance this is a conscious choice by McGowan, Toews, or both to keep the scope of Elf’s inner feelings a secret from the audience –the story is after all told through Yoli’s point of view, and in fairness she asks some of these very questions of Elf herself. She has lived with the same trauma and it hasn’t steered her in the same drastic directions. Trauma of course manifests in different ways in different people, but Elf refuses to open up and share the extent of her suffering. And it is frustrating, to us and to Yoli –which is good and real.
But the one area where I’m confident something is missing that shouldn’t be is in the traumatic impact of the Mennonite community on both women. I get the distinct impression that the movie wants that aspect of the sisters’ background to be a contributing factor in Elf’s situation, but it doesn’t come across. Flashbacks courtesy of Yoli don’t acknowledge their faith community a whole lot, beyond a couple instances of their father (Donal Logue) butting heads with the church authorities –usually off-screen. It is implied this was a repressive environment but never explored. The most the movie allows of relaying an idea of the harm from that community is a scene of a manipulative reverend coming into Elf’s hospital room unannounced to preach at her –and he is scared away quickly by an impromptu strip show.
Still, though nothing is much talked about during their meetings, Yoli and Elf’s interactions are the fundamental backbone of the movies’ precepts. Out of this comes a measured attitude that speaks to a very authentic coping mechanism. Interspersed through their bleak talk are reminiscences, frank discussions of relationships and life choices, these things linked in their own way to the context at hand. But it always returns to the suicide, and the topic of most consistence is Elf’s desire for Yoli to take her to Switzerland where she can legally end her life. And once again the sensitivity with which this is handled is potent -never is this objected to on ethical grounds, rather it is on personal ones. The gravity of such a responsibility and being a participant in her sisters’ death is as powerful for Yoli as the desperation to die is for Elf. One’s need to cling on to someone she loves is superseded by the others’ adamant refusal to go on living.
The film is crucially about grief, confronting the idea that the psychological scars left from the death of a loved one can’t be so easily overcome. And in the third act, it explores this theme viscerally in concert with those notions around suicide. The interpretation that it is a selfish act is addressed, the responsibility of physicians and institutions is called into question. This is where the movie feels most sincere and it doesn’t surprise me at all that Toews based it on her real experience. Like arguably the most responsible movies on such subjects, it doesn’t ultimately find a stable conclusion. It reaches for some kind of profundity, but not to a gross degree like All the Bright Places. It understands that that sadness needs to be felt, that what meaning there is is nebulous -it’s up to the individual to process it.
There is a strength to this because of a performance like Alison Pill’s -perhaps the greatest I’ve seen her give. Her every emotion and every beat just stings so hard and lingers, conveying with the utmost believability a woman of such raw regret and discombobulated feeling. Sarah Gadon is excellent as well, her pain and misery palpable even in the quietest, most considerate moments from Elf. And Mare Winningham is also notable, playing a sharp personality in the mother characterized by a sardonic though still wise and caring demeanour. Her casually dropping the attempted suicide to an old family friend as she’s leaving the hospital with Yoli is one of the films’ better moments of humour.
And it does try to be lighthearted in spots, though it’s not often that successful. More debilitating however are some of the creative and artistic choices made by the filmmakers. A voiceover narration and exposition device is utilized to emphasize the events of the story being its’ own book-within-the-film eventually written by Yoli. But in a number of instances it feels superfluous and a mite distracting. This goes for the flashbacks as well. There’s some strange editing at work too -I think of one particular awkward continuity cut when Yoli confronts a psychiatrist at a cafe. But the technique that most falls flat in relation to dramatic tension is a crucial moment that McGowan plays in slow-motion; the impetus works in illustrating someone’s world coming to a standstill, but the slow-mo plays out far too long in advance, tying in details with no relevance that it loses all effectiveness. I think McGowan has a lot of the right artistic ideas but fails to illustrate them well.
That said, All My Puny Sorrows is still powerful where it counts, and though some of its’ discussion gets muddied and its’ craft leaves much to be desired, the seriousness of its’ approach and of that of its’ cast makes up enough for that. The book it’s based on was essentially a therapeutic exercise and I think this movie has a similar capacity. There should be a space for such art.
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