THE STORY – When her mother suddenly announces that she is moving out to “self actualize,” a sheltered, suburban
1980s tween questions her faith in everything and everyone as she tries to force things back to normal and save her family.
THE CAST – Ruby McGurrin, Abby Elliott, John Reynolds, Lauren MacRae, J.K. Simmons, Jack Innanen, Mary Walsh, Marcus Ngo, Gemma Rosaria Rae & Julianne Arrieta
THE TEAM – Lindsay Lanzillotta (Director) & Christine Speer (Writer)
THE RUNNING TIME – 104 Minutes
Set in the early 1980s, “Purgatory” opens with one of its best scenes: thirteen-year-old Beatrice (Ruby McGurrin, in a confident feature debut) confesses her sins to her parish priest, played by J.K. Simmons, including her negative thoughts about a teacher who pronounces her name like Beat-Rice. Lately, she’s been dreading going off to her Catholic summer camp, and has a general refusal to accept change (unfortunately, there’s a lot of change when you’re a 13-year-old girl). It’s a confident way to introduce a character, and Simmons and McGurrin’s rapport carries the film as he becomes her guide and later offers her the film’s clearest piece of wisdom: neither parents nor religion are perfect.
Both the writing and score carry a light touch that carries through even as the plot turns serious. While Beatrice and her younger sister Chloe (Lauren MacRae, also very funny) are away at camp, their parents decide to divorce and their mother Marianne (Abby Elliott) moves out. The girls return home to a fish meant to soften the blow, but it dies almost immediately, leading to a toilet funeral scored by Beatrice’s off-key flute. Director Lindsay Lanzillotta and screenwriter Christine Speer let comedy and sadness work in tandem, like their father Joe (John Reynolds) serving fish sticks for dinner right after. A small, well-observed joke that introduces a man who has no idea how to handle this big change in their lives.
Marianne’s reasoning for leaving – she married young, had kids early, and now wants to “self-actualize” – is treated with real sympathy. The film understands that her choice is both selfish and ballsy for a mother in the ’80s. In that sense, Marianne is one of the film’s more interesting and complex characters, but she doesn’t get nearly enough screen time. The script would have been stronger if it had shown more of how Marianne arrived at that decision; instead, the move feels sudden. Experiencing her mostly secondhand through Beatrice’s anger and confusion has its limits.
The film is at its best when it lets its characters be hypocritical, like parents doing the exact things they’ve spent years telling their daughters not to do, and letting Beatrice call them on it. That double standard also bleeds into her relationship with the church. Beatrice spends the whole film using confession to work through her anger, but as she watches the adults around her fail to live by what they preach, she tells the priest she no longer wants to be Catholic. His response shows that nothing is as simple as kids want it to be: He reminds her that parents aren’t perfect any more than religion is. It doesn’t resolve her disillusionment, it just asks her to make peace with it, the same way she’s had to make peace with her parents’ divorce.
Beatrice’s scheme to reunite her parents à la “The Parent Trap” never quite gets the comic set piece toward which it seems to be building. It’s a missed opportunity, given how well the film otherwise balances humor against emotional conflict. But the religious framing more than makes up for it: the title does real work here – purgatory as a waiting room for suffering, mapped neatly onto a family stuck between a marriage that’s over and a divorce that isn’t final.
McGurrin is the film’s biggest discovery, playing Beatrice’s anger, confusion, and stubborn hope for repair with a scrappy, lived-in honesty that never feels performed. “Purgatory” is funny and honest about how kids actually see things and earns its place in the coming-of-age genre.
