Playing out in real time, "'night, Mother" is devastating. She's already gone, really, it's just that she needs to tie up some loose ends. But the daughter seems so determined, it feels like it's too late. You hope the mother will succeed in convincing the daughter to stick around. In that film, Anne Bancroft desperate pleading and Sissy Spacek's practical certainty makes for an extremely unnerving watch. The film is clearly told from her point of view, but the voiceover adds next to no insight, and for long sections it falls away altogether.Ĭompare to a film like "'night, Mother," which has a similar theme: a mother tries to stop her daughter from killing herself. Yoli's voiceover is used so inconsistently it never solidifies into an actual choice. These collages create an associative and subjective mood, placing us in Yoli's head, where memories intrude upon the present.
"All My Puny Sorrows" is woven through with collage-like fragments of this moment and others, showing the past, the two sisters as children, the glimpses of their strong bond, the toys they played with, the woods they wandered through, their smiles. It's an image McGowan comes back to again and again. The film opens with Donal Logue, standing on railroad tracks, staring at a train approaching, awaiting his own death, a death he chose. Elf's husband Nic ( Aly Mawji) seems supportive, but also fairly useless, and Elf's psychiatrist is inclined to release her from the hospital. There are a lot of old and complicated family dynamics at play here: Elf was the perfect sister, Yoli the rebel who got pregnant at seventeen, etc. To her I pour'd forth all my puny sorrows." The title of the book (and film) comes from Samuel Taylor Coleridge's poem To a Friend, written for Charles Lamb, whose sister had fallen ill. Elf's suicide note quotes Philip Larkin's haunting and eerie poem Days. The two of them are both well-read, and pepper their conversations with quotes from D.H. The banter between the sisters is sharp and sarcastic. When Elf ends up in the hospital after her second suicide attempt, Yoli flies in from Toronto to "circle the wagons." Elf wants Yoli to help her get to Switzerland where there is a clinic known for assisted suicide. She says to Yoli, point-blank, "You carry a lot of sadness, and for that I am sorry." The girls' mother, Lottie ( Mare Winningham), is a strong and solid woman, who carried on alone, but is devastated at the heavy load her daughters have had to carry. Jake commits suicide soon after, and the family has lived in the aftershock of that event ever since. Jake ran up against similar resistance in his attempts to create a small library. It caused a lot of friction in the traditional hierarchy. Their father Jake ( Donal Logue), butted heads with the elders when he decided to let Elf study music in college. Everything seems to be happening underwater, and this runs counter to the overall subject of generational trauma, suicide, and mortality.Įlf and Yoli grew up in a close-knit and very controlling Mennonite community in Winnipeg. While the adaptation is, in many ways, quite skilled, the pace of "All My Puny Sorrows" is so stately, and the overall tone so reserved, that it results in an emotionally muted film. Director Michael McGowan has adapted Toews' book for the screen, and two powerful actresses- Sarah Gadon and Alison Pill-play the sisters.
Toews' book is a painful one, but it's also funny, sharp-witted, giving a rich texture to this very specific Mennonite family and the ways they cope, endure, hold each other up (or not).
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