by Shaun Munro | Flickering Myth
Michael McGowan’s (Still Mine) adaptation of Miriam Toews’ 2014 novel of the same name boldly examines the difficult realities of guiding a loved one through a battle against suicidal ideations and does so impactfully enough to offset its more flowery adornments.
Writer Yoli (Alison Pill) is the mother of a deeply sarcastic teenager and, in the midst of a rough divorce, is struggling to find a romantic connection. Her sister Elf (Sarah Gadon) is meanwhile a famous, much-respected concert pianist who nevertheless contends with a crippling wave of depression, while their mother Lottie (Mare Winningham) is forever concerned that the mental health woes that claimed their father’s (Donal Logue) life may endanger theirs. This comes to bear when Elf calmly insists to Yoli that she wishes to commit suicide.
In the first few minutes of McGowan’s film, you’d be forgiven for assuming All My Puny Sorrows was a typical Quirky Indie Comedy; between the protagonist’s unusual names and the too-cool-for-school, “nobody talks like this” nature of the dialogue, that heightened approach could threaten to diminish the pic’s true-to-life resonance.
And while the extremely pithy nature of the clapbacks between characters won’t ring true for everyone, McGowan smartly centers his film less around witticisms than opening an honest dialogue about a subject still mostly cloistered away by society – mental health, depression, and especially suicide.
A thread of generational trauma is pronounced throughout, from Yoli and Elf’s Mennonite immigrant grandfather having been persecuted by the Bolsheviks, to the ambiguous nature of their father’s suicide – implied to be related to the Mennonite community’s strict control over their lives – and now Elf’s full-hearted desire to visit Switzerland in order to be euthanized.
As much as audiences will be left in anxious tension waiting to see whether or not Elf carries out her act, this drama is far less concerned with melodramatic turns of the plot than it is rewiring society’s conception of suicidal thoughts. “There’s nothing to forgive,” Lottie says of Elf’s mindset, while Elf considers suicide as much a terminal illness as cancer.
McGowan and his cast do a stellar job of exploring the immense difficulties a person faces in trying to help a suicidal person – be they friend, lover, or sibling – and how challenging it can be for those outsides of the depressive bubble, even medical professionals, to fully understand it. In one telling moment, Elf tells her sister, “You have a low-grade understanding of despair,” something few audience members will likely agree with by the film’s end.
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