This is a film where characters speak in articulate, cannily observed truths that nonetheless don’t feel entirely true to life: “One of us had to show some empathy to Dad and his acres of existential sadness,” says one sister, in supposed anger, during an argument. Burdened by its duty of care to a fragile text, the film preserves too much of it wholesale, its writing taking on a literary artificiality that doesn’t quite match Toews’ elegant candor, even when the phrasing remains the same. 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.īut it’s also weighed down by a heavy dourness that doesn’t mark the novel. On screen, then, “All My Puny Sorrows” is affecting, as any reasonably faithful adaptation of the novel could hardly fail to be. 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.

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.

Miriam 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.

All the puny sorrows