Fest Track On Sirk TV Film Review: ALL MY PUNY SORROWS [Toronto International Film Festival 2021 - Virtual]
The texture of depression and suicide is an interesting perception to partake. Most who don't suffer cannot understand its rehabilitation. The texture of why is always something in play. Someone might have everything it seems but there is emptiness, even surrounded by people. "All My Puny Sorrows" [Special Presentations] casts Alison Pill and Sarah Gadon as sisters. While both have had small screen success as of late, it is interesting to see a slow methodical, almost stage-ready piece of sorts on the path of grief. Pill plays Yoli who is going through an upheaval in her own life, both in the collapse of her marriage and her inability to write. Her greater sustenance is kept hidden and that is one of the film's plot holes. Nevertheless , when her sister Elf [Godon] has an episode, before her tour as a world renown cancer painist, Yoli rushes to her side. The best drama takes place in small hospital and holding rooms between Pill and Gadon as they dance around the reasons each other should do certain things or accept what it inevitable.
Their mother Lottie is played by Mare Winningham with a sense of knowing but also inevitability. Pill's Yoli describes her as stoic and, as the first scene unfolds, we watch as her father (played quietly by veteran indie actor Donal Logue) is lost via a suicide. The movie takes a very specific view to depression in this way, not to describe it but to show its affects and the inability for the person to control. Writer/Director Michael McGowan in adapting Miraim Toews' novel understands these subtilties. Granted Elf is her own worst enemy but it is her life. There are little moments of still like when Pill's character relates small little one-word postcards Elf sent her that helped her get through a bad breakup in a cold winter in Montreal. In this moment, the sun drifts right below the horizon outside the window behind them. "All My Puny Sorrows" is specific and not everyone's cup of tea but as a study in character progression, despite a little too much voice over, it hits the right notes with controlled and vivid performances, especially from the lead two actresses. One moment towards the end, when Winningham holds Pill, a mother herself in the movie, she says "sometimes getting over grief is as hard as grief itself". Pill seems to melt into her mom and its says everything about the journey in that moment. B
By Tim Wassberg
