“Stories We Tell” is a groundbreaking documentary tackling the most familiar of subjects: your own family. It’s Director Sarah Polley’s (“Away From Her,” “Take This Waltz”) own account of her family’s life story along with the accounts from each of her family members, but she weaves a story that feels universal. What’s daring and so intellectual about it is hidden deep into the film after it has wrapped you in its warm family embrace.
“Who the fuck cares about our stupid family,” asks one of Polley’s sisters as she sits down in front of the camera. Polley tells the story, “the whole story, in your own words,” of her mother Diane from the perspective of everyone living who was directly involved in her life. And while we quickly get to know Diane as a charming, life-of-the-party type woman from the memories of her family and friends and from archive, home movie footage, Polley is smart to make us think about her sister’s question.
What the whole family realizes after some time however is that no one perspective is the “truth,” and when Polley picks and chooses the details that don’t conflict, the ones that tell a good story and show the Diane that she wants to remember, the narrative she edits together is less a reflection of any truth we’d like it to be.
If this sounds like profound homework, it’s not. Polley devotes time to her father Michael to narrate a long autobiography of his life with Diane. Together with the family on camera, they talk of falling in love, sex, the highs and lows of home life, personal secrets and the dark, often sad state of their marriage. Diane died of cancer when Polley, the youngest of all the family’s siblings by over a decade, was just a child.
Over time however, Polley uncovered a strange story that for years was just a running joke in her family. Ever since Sarah was born, there were murmurs that Diane had an affair when she went off and acted in a play in Montreal. At times there was question of whether an abortion was in order, or if she might have another father due to her red hair, but as Diane got ill, any rumors were just water under the bridge.
Polley introduces some real fun, faux melodrama and soap opera twists into her life story. She edits together talking head interviews as though these people are in the room, and because they’re all family members, she has a kinship and chemistry with her subject that it takes most documentarians years of time and footage to build. Slowly but surely she reveals to us the Polley family tree, complete with little hints that her brother is gay or that her sisters were all divorced.
This elegant set dressing goes a long way, and Polley uses the nuance and intricacies of their stories and the nature in which we as humans remember things to pull a rabbit out of her hat.
What she does is not so much meta, not so much trickery, but she manages to show her hand so elegantly, making “Stories We Tell” resemble an experimental documentary on par with “The Arbor” or some of Werner Herzog’s work. The conflict and depth of Polley’s mind and the choices she makes are buried in the tranquil, nuanced layers of the film’s themes about memory and truth.
“Stories We Tell” is a touchingly bittersweet history of a woman’s family first and a thoughtful, profound exploration of the mind, how we tell stories and how we believe them second. Polley has made one of the most intellectual, insightful films of the year, and she’s done so with the love and ease found in a family dinner table conversation.
4 stars