"Goodness is doing the should": Catherine Keener on the gray areas of life

Reta Winters has many reasons to be happy; she's a successful writer, she and her partner have three lovely daughters...

That is, until her eldest daughter, Norah, leaves home.

Reta finds Norah camped out in front of Toronto's Honest Ed's holding a cardboard sign that reads a single word: Goodness. 

In trying to understand her daughter's motivations, Reta herself questions the very nature of goodness, happiness and how to just be in this world. 

That's the plot of Unless, Catherine Keener's latest film based on beloved Canadian author Carol Shields' novel by the same name. 

With the film making it's world premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival this week, Keener joins guest host Candy Palmater in studio q. 

On goodness

Toronto - the city and it's people, inadvertently became another character in the film. 

While filming the emotional scene where Reta beseeches Norah to come home, Keener noticed a passerby was deeply shaken by the conversation unfolding in front of her. So much so that Keener felt compelled to follow the Torontoian and explain  to her that it was just a movie. 

This left Keener convinced of one thing: the inherent goodness of people. 

"All of these people that didn't know anything, their natural reaction is to be good, to care and act accordingly," she says.

WEB EXTRA | Watch the trailer for Unless, an official selection of TIFF 2016, below.