“I, too, a sister had, an only sister —
She loved me dearly, and I doted on her;
To her I pour’d forth all my puny sorrows.”
There are a lot of old and complicated family dynamics at play here: Elf was the perfect sister, Yoli the rebel who got pregnant at seventeen, etc. Elf’s husband Nic (Aly Mawji) seems supportive, but also fairly useless, and Elf’s psychiatrist is inclined to release her from the hospital. Yoli begs him not to.
The film opens with Donal Logue, standing on railroad tracks, staring at a train approaching, awaiting his own death, a death he chose. It’s an image McGowan comes back to again and again. “All My Puny Sorrows” is woven through with collage-like fragments of this moment and others, showing the past, the two sisters as children, the glimpses of their strong bond, the toys they played with, the woods they wandered through, their smiles. These collages create an associative and subjective mood, placing us in Yoli’s head, where memories intrude upon the present. Yoli’s voiceover is used so inconsistently it never solidifies into an actual choice. The film is clearly told from her point of view, but the voiceover adds next to no insight, and for long sections it falls away altogether.
Compare to a film like “‘night, Mother,” which has a similar theme: a mother tries to stop her daughter from killing herself. In that film, Anne Bancroft desperate pleading and Sissy Spacek’s practical certainty makes for an extremely unnerving watch. You hope the mother will succeed in convincing the daughter to stick around. But the daughter seems so determined, it feels like it’s too late. She’s already gone, really, it’s just that she needs to tie up some loose ends. Playing out in real time, “‘night, Mother” is devastating. “All My Puny Sorrows” has all the elements to pack a devastating punch, but there’s no real sense of urgency. It’s like people are just marking time, like the end has already been determined, it’s just a matter of resigning oneself to the inevitable.
The three actresses are wonderful—particularly Pill, who inhabits Yoli’s ragged insecurities with comfort and familiarity (bringing some welcome humor to this mostly glum affair). Yoli feels very real. The scenes with her daughter Nora (Amybeth McNulty) are some of the best in the film, quiet and insightful. Gadon is a wonderful actress, although here she mostly just lies in a hospital bed, staring off vaguely and sadly into the distance. There are moments when the heat is turned up underneath the characters—when Yoli tells Elf how much she will miss her, for example—but it’s never enough. The temperature remains lukewarm.
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