All My Puny Sorrows (2021)

(On Cable TV, December 2022) It’s a mistake to believe that films should be universal. Most movies are very specifically made for very specific audiences, and one of the most frustrating experiences in reading online movie reviews is encountering a reviewer who’s not in the target audience trying to approach the film on less-than-friendly terms. The only decent thing is to state biases up-front, and so: wow, am I the wrong person to fairly assess writer-director-producer Michael McGowan’s All My Puny Sorrows. From the title onward, this is the kind of mainstream drama aimed at a very specific audience, one that doesn’t have much use for genre thrills. To me, the result is like watching paint try, as much of the film is about two sisters—one suicidal, the other one trying to rescue the other from the brink. There’s a complex tissue of familial subplots, but much of it is quite simple. It doesn’t help that it’s all executed in dour, literary fashion in a way that seems to scream for awards or at least respect from the highbrow audience. (Accordingly, it got nominated for a slew of Canadian screen awards.) I didn’t buy into it—even being as lenient as possible, the film, its characters and subplots all left me exasperated and bored at once. A lot like reading a mainstream Canadian literary novel, of which this is indeed an adaptation. Not exactly a recommendation—but then again, I’m not among those for whom All My Puny Sorrows is made for.