Alison Pill, Sarah Gadon take on famed Miriam Toews book 'All My Puny Sorrows'

Famed novel by Miriam Toews has been adapted into a movie with the impactful All My Puny Sorrows, starring Alison Pill and Sarah Gadon, in theatres in Toronto, Vancouver and Montreal on April 15 after making its debut at last year's Toronto International Film Festival.

“In the history of mankind, has there ever been a more obvious truth than the statement, we are all going to die?" the voiceover at the beginning of the movie states. "And yet, in our bones, how many of us can actually conceptualize death, understand it?”

Yoli (Pill) is trying to stay motivated in her career as a writer, while trying to navigate her divorce from her daughter’s father. Yoli gets a call from her mother, played by Mare Winningham, that her sister Elf (Gadon), an acclaimed pianist, tried to kill herself, 10 years after their father committed suicide.

As Yoli rushes to be by her family’s side she has flashbacks to her upbringing in the Mennonite community and the constraints of that experience, including the push back her parents and sister faced when Elf wanted to leave the community to go to university to study music, for example.

“I want to die, this isn’t a mistake,” Elf tells her sister when Yoli arrives at the hospital.

'Levity in the face of despair'

With the family having a long history with suicide, All My Puny Sorrows puts forward thought provoking questions around not just death, but depression and relationships with religion as well, all with this dry humour that will still make you laugh amidst the severity of the topic, which truly gives the film a more realistic experience as a viewer.

“I think what excited me was this combination of kind of ferocious love and serious humour, and levity in the face of despair,” Alison Pill told Yahoo Canada. “Also, getting to play an interesting kind of mom and an interesting kind of daughter, and an interesting kind of sister, looking at these different facets of this complicated woman in a really honest way.”

Sarah Gadon said she was definitely in a phase of reading all of Miriam Toews’ work and got particularly excited about the characters in her novels.

“She's always kind of exploring the female experience as it is enmeshed in the family dynamic,” the actor said. “That to me was so fascinating because we have these people in our families, and we don't choose who they are, and they do things and then all of a sudden our whole life experience becomes filtered through these people, and through their choices.”

“Miriam has such a great way of exploring that, like Alison said, with intensity and darkness, but also silly humour, and her humour is so Canadian, it's so dry and silly.”

For filmmaker Michael McGowan, what attracted him to the book, leading him into the process of adapting it into a film, was that it was not just a “bleak,” “dark” and “tough” journey.

“It's a difficult film but there's really moments of hope and levity, and brightness, and I think that juxtaposition of extreme sadness with humour was what she did so well in the book, that I tried to do,” McGowan said.

The 'heart' of 'All My Puny Sorrows'

Some of the best scenes in All My Puny Sorrows are quite simple in terms of their setup, often just Yoli and Elf alone having a discussion (sometimes with more anger than other times), to the point where it almost feels like you’re watching a play.

“I think we did the most work on the hospital scenes between Sarah and I because they are like little plays, and I really felt like rehearsing them and figuring out what exactly each of them had to say to further the story, to further the character,” Alison Pill explained. “You're in this hospital room, so figuring out the power of choosing one seat over another, of sitting on one bad versus another, of being closer, being far when you're in this kind of small room, all of those little things add up to a much bigger picture.”

“Those scenes were the heart of the movie where, if they worked, the movie and the journey would work."

All My Puny Sorrows will be in theatres in Toronto, Vancouver and Montreal on April 15, in Winnipeg in April 22, and other cities throughout the spring.