‘All My Puny Sorrows’ Review: Two Sisters Debate the Merits of Living in a Sincere But Stilted Grief Drama
variety.comGuy Lodge Film CriticMiriam Toews’ 2014 novel “All My Puny Sorrows” thrives on the kind of fraught tonal whiplash that comes with the most intimate of relationships to one’s subject.
Inspired by the suicide of the author’s sister, the book is a veiled grief memoir that veers wildly between plangent, poetic despair, plainspoken journaling and blunt, cutting humor — a spectrum mirroring the variable stages of grief itself.
We can risk brutality and bad taste in the name of honesty when telling our own stories; Michael McGowan’s adaptation of “All My Puny Sorrows,” on the other hand, approaches its with a respectful timidity that honors Toews’ words, but never quite animates them.On screen, then, “All My Puny Sorrows” is affecting, as any reasonably faithful adaptation of the novel could hardly fail to be.
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 — as two women who, depending on the day, either understand each other all too well or don’t know each other at all.
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