North of Normal
Film review by Thom Ernst
(July 29, 2023 – Toronto, ON) As an adverb, normal is a contentious enough word, but as a noun, it’s darn right hellish. While some aspire for normalcy (a home, a job, a television) others run far from it. But normal is a constantly shifting variable bound to change through generations. I don’t relish anyone given the task of defining what’s normal and what isn’t.
Carly Stone’s North of Normal—a film based on Cea Sunrise Person’s (her name reveals a lot) bestseller, ‘North of Normal: A Memoir of My Wilderness Childhood, My Counterculture Family, and How I Survived Both’—normalcy, or the lack of, is given all the shades of good and bad, stability and romanticism. Mostly without judgement. But some judgement. Nearly everyone in the film has good intentions (save for one)
North of Normal is an easy to like coming of age tale that soars on the idealism of living off the grid but soft-lands when it gets to the hard stuff. And there’s not a lot of hard stuff.
Having not read Person’s book (yet) it’s irresponsible to assume the accuracy in which Stone harnesses Person’s original intent. Yet, as a story about a young girl coming to terms with living off the grid while, and then later searching for a way to plug in, North of Normal (at the risk of breaking my own rule) seems…well…too normal.
Stone, from a script by Alexandra Weir, jumps between timelines with Cea as a child (River Price-Maenpaa) and later as a teen (Amanda Fix). Little Cea lives with her mother (Sarah Gadon), her mother’s boyfriend (Benedict Samuel), her grandfather, Papa Dick (Robert Carlyle) and Grandma Jeanne (Janet Porter). She is a precocious child with an imagination as wild as the Yukon wilderness where they live. Later we see Cea as a teenager, reconnecting with her mother in the city.
The story is appropriately, told through the gaze of both versions of Cea’s; Cea as child and Cea as teen. As the child Cea, Price-Maenpaa conveys the wonderment and confusion of a life lived as an adventure. Fix takes over as Cea as a teen when priorities shift away from adventure and closer to something like security.
But it’s Sarah Gadon, a stand-out in Michael McGowan’s All My Puny Sorrows, who slides in with yet another stellar performance. Her free-spirited mother, pregnant at 15, an age young enough to be left floundering to discover her own way in the world, wraps tenderness, irresponsibility, selfishness and affection into every act and non-act she makes.
Solid performances lift the film above the traps of romanticising (or demonizing) the life choices made on behalf of a young girl. It all seems harmless, even when harm enters in.
North of Normal, from Elevation Pictures, opened July 28, 2023 and is playing at selected cinemas. Click here to watch the trailer and learn more about the cast and crew of North of Normal.
Thom Ernst is a Toronto based film critic and writer and an active member of the (TFCA) Toronto Film Critics’ Association. His work has appeared in various publications including Playback Magazine, The Toronto Star, and The National Post. He is known to CBC Radio listeners for his lively contributions to Fresh Air, Metro Morning, and CBC Syndication as well as appearing on-air for CTV News Channel and The Agenda with Steve Paikin. He was host, interviewer and producer of televisions’ longest running movie program Saturday Night at the Movies. Currently he can be heard interviewing Canadian filmmakers on the Kingston Canadian Film Festival podcast, Rewind, Fast-Forward.
