Critic Reviews

I love this movie like a person. It pierced my heart the way certain paintings or pieces of music do. The way standing at the foot of a mountain does. The first time I saw it, I had to stay in my cinema seat for five minutes after it ended, to finish crying. The second time, I vowed to watch it more analytically, but ended up crying all over again.

It’s a fact of life that a novel about the right to die can’t be represented in depth in 105 minutes. But a compelling essence remains in this story about two sisters from a Manitoba Mennonite community - one with a mess of a life who nonetheless wants to live, the other, blessed with a seemingly perfect life, who wants the opposite.

The ensemble builds believable chemistry as intimate family members, and when their characters deliver their arguments for life or death, the stakes feel appropriately high.

One can’t help coming away with the feeling that if the intelligence and originality of All My Puny Sorrows matched its earnestness, they could’ve really had something here.

All My Puny Sorrows never quite escapes the burden of its genre. The literary framework artificially raises the tone of the discussion, but heavy helpings of voice-over narration weigh on it with a gravitas that is already implied and need not be pounded into our ears, scene after scene.

As a portrait of sisterly trust, obligation and estrangement, and the difficulty of carrying familial dependencies into adulthood and beyond, the film is measured and thoughtful, lifted by performances of characteristic sensitivity by Alison Pill and Sarah Gadon.

An icy Sarah Gadon can’t plumb it, offering a quietly mannered performance where a beautifully furrowed brow and occasional tear suggest the character cares more about looking elegant than dying. Thankfully, in the warmer roles of Yoli and her resilient Mennonite mother, Alison Pill and Mare Winningham do find the big broken heart at the core of this story.

While its performances are lovely and tender, with the execution somewhat messy in its handling of themes, All My Puny Sorrows doesn’t dig past the surface enough to make a strong enough case for itself.

It is by no means a misfire and features a trio of tremendous performances from Pill, Gadon, and Mare Winningham. But given the source material and the ingredients, Sorrows certainly qualifies as a disappointment.

That McGowan admires the source material and wants to do it justice is clear, and that he’s resisted the temptation to sand down its sharpest edges speaks to a desire to meet his troubled characters where they are. But his movie ends up just another reminder that paying tribute to a novel isn’t the same as breathing it into life.