They headed north to the wilderness in the 1970s, when Michelle (Sarah Gadon) was 15 and pregnant with Cea, “because if there was one thing Papa Dick was sure of, it was that the wilderness would solve all their problems.” They ended up in the Kootenay Plains, up in Alberta, where “Papa Dick” (Robert Carlyle) headed up a commune that sounds an awful lot like a cult.
Cea Sunrise Person first told her story in her 2014 memoir, “North of Normal,” which has been adapted into a film of the same name by director Carly Stone and screenwriter Alexandra Weir. She lived off the grid for years with her grandparents and Michelle, the kind of mother who says things like “Carl and I love each other — and he’s an Aries” — before Michelle, Carl, and Cea left the commune to be “a real family.”
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But it didn’t quite work out that way. We jump to Ontario circa 1986, where Cea (played as a teen by Amanda Fix) steps off a bus for a reunion with her mother, from whom she has apparently been separated for quite some time. And thus, we’re told a story in parallel: what happened after they left together all those years ago and what happens now as they make another go of it.
Stone and Weir take their time filling in those blanks, which is fine; we can put things together before we know what happened. The interactions, movements, and subtext tell us what a chaotic, on-the-margins life Michelle leads. She’s in a new house with her new boyfriend — there’s always a new boyfriend — and Cea’s going to try to make a go of it at a public school; quite the adjustment from her previous, er, home-schooling.
“North of Normal” intersperses these two narratives and timeframes with real skill, bound as they are by the commonality of the themes. Michelle is less like a mom and more like a cool sister, so Cea has always lived a boundary-free existence for better and (mostly, it seems) for worse. The difference is what she knows; as a child, she takes it all in and assumes her mother knows best. Her older, jaded self turns these observations into a combustible mixture of neediness and resentment.
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Weir’s screenplay is fairly predictable, but that’s as it should be; it unfolds as real events would (and did). If anything, the picture is powered by the viewer’s dreadful certainty of knowing where this is headed and where Cea has been. Stone’s execution and her cast’s performances manage to avoid the trappings and clichés of melodrama most of the time; a cancer diagnosis is handled without undue tears, though a hair-chopping scene is unfortunate.
Carlyle’s very good — direct, unsentimental, and graceful — in a role quite unlike anything he’s done before. Gadon, soulful and natural as ever, plays her character’s flaws and humanity in equal proportion. She says a line like “I don’t know why this stuff happens to us, baby, it just does,” with such conviction that you almost want to go along. River Price-Maenpaa and Amanda Fix have the trickiest roles as (respectively) the child and teen Cea. Price-Maenpaa is heartbreaking, a gifted vessel for this poor kid’s many disappointments, while Fix skillfully conveys the character’s tricky mixture of angst and resilience. “North of Normal” hits occasional false notes, but it finds just the right ones when it really matters. [B+]
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