Toronto: ‘Purgatory’ Director Navigates Warring Parents and Girl Power in Dark Divorce Comedy

What’s a girl to do when your parents split up and leave your sheltered, suburban home and school life in ruins?

That’s the premise for 1980s-set Purgatory, Lindsay Lanzillotta’s debut feature that stars J.K. Simmons, The Bear’s Abby Elliot, John Reynolds and Ruby McGurrin in her first movie role as Beatrice Gravel.

McGurrin emerges as the movie’s MVP for playing a scrappy 13-year-old left questioning her family and faith — basically everyone and everything around her — after her mother chooses to take time away from her family to “self-actualize.” That leaves her father, Joe Gravel (John Reynolds), to pick up the pieces of a fractured family as he cares for Beatrice and her sister, Chloe, played by Lauren MacRae.

Lanzillotta directed Purgatory from a screenplay by Christine Speer and looked to get into Beatrice’s head as, while naive as a coming-of-age tween, she’s also hyper-aware and traumatized by her disrupted home and school life. “It’s like when feelings are on top of your skin, everyone does feel a little fake around you and doesn’t feel what you’re feeling and you wonder, ‘Does anyone see how I’m feeling,’” the director explains.

But in a small town where empathy has virtually disappeared to be replaced by heartlessness and even savagery among Beatrice’s high school friends and their parents, the exception and vital opening for tenderness in Purgatory comes with J.K. Simmons as Father Malone.

His Catholic priest character, as he has Beatrice in his confession booth, becomes a kind and assuring mentor for a young girl as he teaches her difficult truths about growing up while her life is under siege. “I wanted him to feel like her friend, her confidante, and her therapist all at the same time, and also this wonderful person to guide her,” Lanzillotta explains, even as Father Malone and Beatrice are separated by a screen in the confessional.  

Here the director also puts her film’s audience in its own confessional chair, should their own dark secrets around familial divorce resonate. After all, during the 1980s when Purgatory is set, family skeletons generally remained deeply hidden in the closet. “I do feel like I’m of the Oprah generation, where we talk about things more. And amazingly, people still don’t talk about things enough,” Lanzillotta insists.

Offering the lead role of Beatrice to McGurrin, whose earlier credits were for kids TV series, was a gamble, but one that Lanzillotta felt confident taking after the young actor’s audition. “She (McGurrin) was clearly the best one to play Beatrice. It’s no best or better. She was her. And her faces with talent. She doesn’t need to say much for you to feel her feelings,’ the director insists.

There are comic touches in Purgatory when a local cop, Officer Boyd Safety, tries to warn an assembly at Holy Trinity Assembly against predatory strangers, or a teacher, played by Mary Walsh, warns her class with a fire-and-brimstone presentation about purgatory.  

Meanwhile, the coming-of-age dramedy has Beatrice pursuing a plan, Parent Trap-style, to reunite her parents as her mother, Marianne Gravel (Elliot) takes a toy boy, played by Jack Innanen. That’s even as she continues to question her marriage and is torn by the push-pull of being a mother and meeting her own emotional needs.

And meanwhile, a now take-charge Mr. Gravel has found his own girlfriend, which is followed by Beatrice making an outburst against a teacher during a talk on sex education, and her sister Chloe going missing. Lanzillotta insists she has left it to audiences for her bittersweet comedy to judge whether Beatrice’s parents have done well, or not, by their children amid escalating family tensions.

“I really want that to be a complex conversation about how you feel about her (Marianne Gravel), because none of us is perfect, right?” the director says. “And most people with the dad, they end up falling in love with him, which is really a testament to John Reynold’s performance as Joe,” she adds about the American actor best known for playing Drew Gardner in Search Party and Officer Callahan in Stranger Things.

Purgatory, which is being shopped at TIFF: The Market by Gersh’s Jessica Lacey, is produced by Lanzillotta, Simone Kirlew, Aldo Lanzillotta, Denis Gumustas, Mark O’Neill and Gus Murray.