Adapting Goethe’s sturm-und-drang classic The Sorrows of Young Werther into a buoyant, bright Canadian rom-com feels like a horrendously awful idea on paper. And, for the first few minutes of José Lourenço film, I was convinced that it was. This is an aggressively quirky movie, one that feels buried in twee in its opening scenes. But I have to say, much like the characters in this film eventually fall for “Young Werther,” this movie won me over. Douglas Booth is charmingly determined, but the real lynchpin to this film’s success is Alison Pill, an underrated performer in general who gives one of the most genuinely likable turns of her career.
Pill plays Charlotte, who Booth’s Werther meets one day on a trip to the city. He is instantly head over heels, and the two spend a magical night together at a party, enriched by the fact that Booth and Pill have that thing that seems so increasingly rare in modern romantic movies: chemistry. Just the way Werther looks at Charlotte becomes heartwarming, even after we learn that she’s engaged to a nice man named Albert (Patrick J. Adams). However, like the source, “Young Werther” isn’t a story of a man swooping in and saving a damsel-in-distress from a doomed partnership. Albert is a nice, good guy. Werther even likes him. What do you do when you’re in love with someone who’s already happily in love with someone else?
At times, “Young Werther” can feel over-directed, but the vibrancy of the project serves as a platform for Booth and Pill to shine. And so they do, winning over viewers with their commitment to a unique project in that it’s a buoyant, often jubilant take on a relatively nihilistic tale with no good options. Those familiar with the source may wonder how they get out of the last act and maintain a tone that can be described as “snappy”—I won’t spoil it, but I did find the closing scenes of “Young Werther” likable enough. It’s gone from a tale about the bleak reality of love and life to one about the formative chapters of youth, the ones in which we are defined by those we meet and those we fall for, even if we can’t help it.
Much like I’ve long admired Allison Pill’s natural screen presence, I think Theresa Palmer is a wildly underrated actress, one who always finds an organic way into every character she’s playing. She does so again in Australian Marcelle Lunam’s “Addition,” but she is left adrift by the rest of the film. Every choice that Palmer makes in this romantic drama works, but the script, the flat direction, and the rest of the ensemble just don’t add up.
Maybe it was a better book by Toni Jordan. Likely a source with rich internal monologue to fill in the gaps of this shallow script, “Addition” is the story of a woman named Grace who has something called arithmomania, a need to count everything in her life. On the record, even though I didn’t know it had a name, I’ve always had a minor version of this wherein I count in my head the toothbrush strokes almost every night or most sets of stairs I take, but it’s more of a quirk than Grace’s often debilitating OCD. She is forced by her mental illness to count everything, even stuff that seems impossible like the bristles on her toothbrush. When she loses this sense of order in her world, she emotionally collapses, unable to even leave her house.
Of course, “Addition” will reveal the trauma that brought on this condition, giving it one negative in my eyes in that I can’t stand “mental illness explainer” movies that like to put complex issues in neat boxes, and another cinematic pet peeve emerges when Grace meets a man, setting in a motion yet another tale about how those with trauma-induced mental illness just need to find love.
To be fair, Lunam avoids some of those traps, but it’s partially because we just don’t really care about the budding relationship between Grace and Seamus (Joe Dempsie). “Addition” suffers greatly from a supporting character problem in that literally everyone around Grace is shallowly developed, little more than devices on Grace’s journey. Again, this is likely a source material issue, but that doesn’t make it any more tolerable. It’s not just that Palmer is easily the best thing about “Addition,” it’s that there’s not even a close second.
Finally, there’s the well-intentioned but a bit amateur “My Fathers’ Daughter,” a coming-of-age tale with a big heart but an obvious arc. Still, this is a hard movie to hate, even if I kept hoping it would break out of the boxes it’s obviously in to do something that felt fresh and new. The film’s young star is one to watch, but even she pushes against a character who often feels like she’s saying and doing things because she’s in a movie. There’s a version of this film that either leans harder into realism (a la the Dardennes, for example) or explores riskier narrative ground. As is, it falls somewhere in the middle, likable but forgettable.
Egil Pedersen’s film is the tale of Elvira (Sarah Olaussen Eira), who has grown up on the coastal village of Unjárga in the FAR north of Norway. In denial of her Sámi background and pushing back against her mother’s lesbian relationship, Elvira dreams of a biological father she’s never known, even imagining him as Nikolaj Coster-Waldau. The “Game of Thrones” star has a few fun cameos early in the film, but even these feel half-considered, something that should be more playful than they are in this tonally inconsistent work.
Of course, Elvira’ father is not NCW, which she learns the hard way when her real dad Terje (Aslat Mahtte Gaup) gets out of prison and returns home. Of course, he sucks, forcing Elvira to really consider what matters in life, and maybe be a little nicer to her mother, and to herself.
“My Fathers’ Daughter” has some tender, well-drawn performances, but they often butt up against clearly manufactured arcs like the way Elvira deals with school conflict or resents her mother’s partner. It’s a film that feels stuck between coming-of-age tropes and something more character-driven, too often falling into the comfort and simplicity of the former to really recommend.
