All My Puny Sorrows

All My Puny Sorrows

She wanted to die; I wanted her to live. We were enemies, but we loved each other. These words are spoken by Yolandi (“Yoli”), the narrator of Miriam Toews’ All My Puny Sorrows, and they encapsulate her relationship with her sister Elfrieda (“Elf”). Elf is a world renowned concert pianist who has attempted suicide multiple times; Yoli is a writer who dropped everything to be with her in the psych ward. Painful as it is to live, Yoli insists to Elf that life is worth it. But for Elf, death always beckons louder than any concerto.

Toews’ book is funny and sharp-witted even at its darkest moments; the adaptation by director Michael McGowan boasts two equally powerful performances, from Sarah Gadon (as Yoli) and Alison Pill (as Elf). The pace of “All My Puny Sorrows” both the novel and the film is slow enough that every minute detail gets space to breathe, but the movie’s tone remains muted throughout. It feels like everything’s happening underwater which runs counter to a story about generational trauma surrounding suicide.

Elf and Yoli grew up in Winnipeg’s tight-knit Mennonite community under their father Jake (Donal Logue), who clashed with church elders when he let Elf go away to study music at college; likewise for Jake creating a small library in town. Then he died by suicide soon after, leaving behind Lottie (Mare Winningham), his wife and the girls’ mother figure: tough as nails on the outside but softened over time because she carried on alone. Lottie tells Yoli point blank while they’re packing clothes into suitcases before flying back from Toronto: “You carry a lot of sadness for that, I’m sorry.”

Once Elf lands herself back in hospital after attempt no. 2, Yoli flies from Ontario to Winnipeg to “circle the wagons.” Elf wants Yoli’s help getting Switzerland, where there’s an assisted-suicide clinic that takes Canadian citizens. The sisters’ banter is biting and crass; both are well-read and will quote D.H. Lawrence or Paul Valéry at one another over coffee table talk. Days before Elf tried killing herself, she mailed Larkin poem to their house; it was folded up inside her suicide note: “Days.”

Elf did everything right: married a good man named Nic (Aly Mawji), who seems supportive if not particularly useful; became successful pianist on international level. So now what? Her psychiatrist’s ready to release her from hospital with prescription for new anti-anxiety medication, but Yoli pleads with him not to let Elf out so soon.

Starting the record, Donal Logue is on the tracks of a railway line looking at an oncoming train that would kill him but for he has chosen to die. This is one image McGowan returns to over and again. “All my puny sorrows” is full of fragments like these, collage like moments that depict pasts two little girls as sisters, glimpses of their closeness, toys they played with, woods they roamed in, their smiles.

They create an associative and subjective mood; we’re inside Yoli’s head where present time gets interrupted by memory. But the voiceover narration by Yoli is so inconsistent it never becomes an actual choice. The film definitely tells her story (or she is telling it), but the voiceover doesn’t illuminate anything and often falls silent for long stretches.

Consider another film with a similar theme: ‘night mother. A mother tries to keep her daughter from killing herself. In this movie Anne Bancroft begs against Sissy Spacek’s resigned certainty watching it is excruciatingly uncomfortable because you want the mother to succeed in convincing the daughter not to go through with it but also feel sure that she won’t or can’t change her mind now; she’s gone already really just needs tie up some loose ends before she checks out completely; ‘night mother takes place all in one night in real time and so it’s devastating.

All my puny sorrows has all its pieces there ready to be wielded like a weapon but no one seems particularly desperate about using them or rather everyone seems resigned to not needing them at all finishing what’s already been started.

The actresses are all great Pill especially who wears Yoli’s frayed edges like an old coat (she brings some much needed levity into this otherwise very heavy affair). Yoli feels authentic as hell though Gadon mostly lies prone in a hospital bed staring off somewhere sad and far away. There are moments where the heat gets turned up under these characters when Yoli tells Elf how much she’ll miss her for example but it’s not hot enough. The temperature of this movie remains lukewarm.

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