Sarah Gadon stars as Michelle in North of Normal.Elevation Pictures
North of Normal
Classification: N/A; 90 minutes
Directed by Carly Stone
Written by Alexandra Weir from the book by Cea Sunrise Person
Starring Sarah Gadon, Amanda Fix and Robert Carlyle
Opens in theatres July 28
Cea Sunrise Person’s 2014 memoir North of Normal landed like the hoser answer to Jeanette Walls’s bestseller The Glass Castle. Both are about woman raised by free-spirited (read: irresponsible) hippies who justify their stripped-down existence with soapbox idealism. Person grew up in the Canadian wilderness, surrounded by pot and indiscriminate sex, until she broke out on her own to become a fashion model, facing a whole new set of challenges.
North of Normal, the movie, is a stripped-down and spare take on Person’s story, hopping back and forth in time between key events from her childhood and teen years. The film, directed by Carly Stone, stops short of covering Person’s modelling career. Instead, its narrative is more contained, homing in on a fraught mother-daughter relationship and capturing Person’s emotional journey in mostly broad strokes and some recognizable tropes.
The familiarity here is perhaps giving Person the very normality that her character so desperately seeks, despite her eccentric and dysfunctional family. The movie doesn’t just echo The Glass Castle but also Captain Fantastic and the excellent Leave No Trace – fellow families-in-the-bush tales that are about trauma and idealism turning into bad parenting.
North of Normal gets going with a haphazard opening sequence. Pregnant 15-year-old Michelle (Sarah Gadon) is whisked away in a blue-and-white VW beetle by her father Papa Dick (Robert Carlyle, garbling his Scottish accent), who explains, for the audience’s sake, that they must raise the expected child far away from this “godforsaken capitalist society.”
Fast-forward several years, and the family is tented up in Kootenay Plains, Alta. Cea, an eight-year-old played by a precocious River Price-Maenpaa, is largely left to her own devices while her family forages for nuts and Papa Dick speaks a big game about spreading values to passing travellers (in between or during the spread of bodily fluids). The most frustrating thing about Alexandra Weir’s screenplay is that it makes no effort to dig further into Papa Dick’s politics, however fickle they may be. He’s a counterculture archetype, but the movie would rather Carlyle exude Alan Arkin energy while the character’s worldview is summed up with basic rants about tax dollars going into “corrupt government official’s pockets.”
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Except for a mall sequence screaming Reaganomics, the politics and cultural tensions that informed Person’s abnormal upbringing never creep into North of Normal’s bubble. There’s an undercurrent of indecision, a nagging feeling that the material had been worked over in ways that would abandon some of the more compelling threads.
In the end, Stone and Weir keep it intimate. The movie’s focus is on Cea and Michelle’s reunion in Ontario during her teenage years. Cea as a teen (played by Amanda Fix) has been living in the Yukon with her grandparents, abandoned several years before by flighty flower child Michelle. The two women carry on with a vibe that’s less mother-daughter and more like the guarded new girl at school embraced by the popular girl.
Both actors are splendid as women starved for attention: Michelle from any man that teases stability; Cea, from the mother who still refuses to commit to that role. Flashbacks to key events and the molecular awkwardness between the women slowly fill the gaps in the narrative, and the trauma that consistently threatens to break Michelle’s guarded façade.
The movie takes its time to get going, which can be frustrating given how thin the material feels along the way. But that patience also works in its favour during a lovely final act that doesn’t come off as maudlin and forced as this sort of melodrama usually tends to. Stone handles big and difficult emotions on the gentlest terms.
Editor’s note: A previous version of this review incorrectly identified the film’s screenwriter. This version has been corrected.
Special to The Globe and Mail