McGowan, whose humane and humanistic stories include Saint Ralph, One Week and Still Mine, has a light touch with his adaptation, letting his actors’ expressive faces carry the emotional weight of a scene more than once, and often filling screen and screenplay with references to writers and writing – a pan across a bookshelf, a discussion of the importance of libraries, snatches of poetry by Fernando Passoa and Samuel Taylor Coleridge.Īll My Puny Sorrows is a mature and beautiful story, the union of a celebrated author with a filmmaker in his creative prime.

Is it fair to blame Yoli’s collapsed marriage and struggling writing career on this action? And if not, isn’t it heartless to assume it had no effect at all? In the opening scene we learn that the sisters’ father (Donal Logue) killed himself 10 years earlier. Then there are the ripples that a suicide causes in a family and a community. (The other Toews adaptation of 2022, Sarah Polley’s Women Talking, is about members of an isolated Mennonite community trying to reconcile their faith with sexual assaults within the group.) The comic coda to said scene is a complete corker.Īll My Puny Sorrows focuses closely on the bond between the sisters – and as luck would have it, the two actors attended the same Toronto schools and knew each other as children.īut it also encompasses the ways that religion tries (and sometimes fails) to provide comfort in times of stress. Which brings us to the second unforgettable scene, a mere minute and a half long, in which Yoli has words with a stranger in the hospital’s parking garage, totally losing it, before running into her mother (Mare Winningham) inside the building. It’s a microcosm of drama, a little mini-movie in the midst of a larger story that is tinged with the dark hues of a family’s history with suicide, but also with lighter moments of grace and even humour. This advertisement has not loaded yet, but your article continues below.

All the puny sorrows