Review: Mary Goes Round is another case of one too many

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• Mary Goes Round
• Written and directed by Molly McGlynn
  
• Starring Aya Cash, Sara Waisglass and John Ralston
  
• Classification PG; 84 minutes
  

There’s a scene in Mary Goes Round, a quietly comic debut feature from writer and director Molly McGlynn, which takes place at a fancy baby shower. As the overprivileged mommies gather amidst the pastel packages the situation seems ripe for nasty laughs, but McGlynn is determined not to do the obvious. By the time the titular Mary downs several flutes of pink champagne (plus some miniatures of Jack Daniels she’s got stashed in her purse), curses the assembled guests and crashes her boyfriend’s car, you might expect to be guffawing loudly. The effect, however, is much more muted. With a sympathetic performance from Aya Cash in the lead role, McGlynn is not going to produce black comedy at the expense of the alcoholic Mary. Why then, one wonders, has she placed her in such a ridiculous setting?

Mary Goes Round, which enjoyed an international premiere and some flattering attention at the Toronto International Film Festival last September, is a small drama of frustrating restraint. What follows the drunken baby shower is a rather formulaic family story as Mary travels from Toronto to Niagara Falls to visit the father (John Ralston) she has not seen in years. There she discovers he is dying of cancer, and wants her help breaking the bad news to the teenage half-sister (Sara Waisglass) who Mary is meeting for the first time. The pay-off from such a familiar trajectory of estrangement, anger and eventual reunion feels far too small for it to be worth holding back on any directorial flourish that might distinguish the proceedings.

Sometimes McGlynn’s tact does deliver unexpectedly: she is highly sensitive to the plight of alcoholics, and draws a particularly sensitive performance from Melanie Nicholls-King as a self-confident and helpful woman named Lou who Mary meets at an AA meeting. The small details in a scene where Lou reveals that she has fallen off the wagon are among the film’s smartest moments.

In other places, however, the director’s approach is infuriating: the big joke at the top of the film is that Mary, who is busy downing vodka shots in her off hours, actually works as an addiction counsellor. Perhaps the initial scene where a viewer realizes that she is leading a therapy group, not participating in it, does not need to be played for broad comedy, but it should at least produce something more ironically revelatory than a head-shaking sense of the narrative confusion clearing. That whole piece of the story feels like a squandered opportunity.

The scene includes Mary’s unhelpful advice to a woman who is bemoaning her inability to stay sober, and if Cash’s delivery of Mary’s snotty response is a nicely crafted zinger, it’s the other woman’s unbridled rage that actually feels real and engaging. Female alcoholism is mainly a pretext for melodrama at the movies – perhaps you had the misfortune to follow what happened after Emily Blunt began gulping from her spiked water bottle in The Girl on the Train. McGlynn’s quiet approach may be admirable, but it falls awkwardly between two stools, proving itself neither dramatic enough nor fun enough to raise up the drunken Mary.

Mary Goes Round opens March 30 in Toronto.