Love is So Short, Forgetting is So Long

Stories We Tell

**** out of ****

Directed by: Sarah Polley

Running time: 108 minutes

When someone tells a story they insist is true, there is always the opportunity for slivers of fiction to creep into that retelling. Since it is so hard to determine the validity of one story over another, what counts as truth can be highly contested. Even in the framework of a documentary, the possibility of doubt remains.

One can try to label something as truth based on their closeness to the person, situation or concept at the centre, but how can one assess that accuracy over another’s to the same thing? Films like Akira Kurosawa’s Rashomon and Errol Morris’s 1988 documentary The Thin Blue Line stirred the pot of linear narrative by having its characters or figures project different, irreconcilable versions of the same story.

Those tenuous strands that separate fact from fiction come to the forefront of Stories We Tell, a stunning cinematic achievement from filmmaker Sarah Polley. It is an experimental documentary of sorts, as well as a mystery, a family exposé and a deeply moving look at tangled human relationships, centering around Polley’s family.

Stories We Tell begins with the interview subjects – Sarah’s father Michael, an accomplished Anglo-Canadian actor, and her four siblings, among others – preparing to be filmed by the writer/director. Michael is placed in a recording booth with two cameras pointed at him. He stands in front a podium with a small stack of papers lying on it, a biography that Michael wrote and will recite to his daughter (and to the audience).

Polley asks her family and friends to retell the stories of their lives in their own words. The focus of these narratives is Polley’s mother, Diane, a vivacious beauty who died from cancer when Sarah was 11.

According to the actor-turned-director, these are not interviews but an interrogation. Sarah is keen to discover deeper truths about her family’s history.

As the story goes, Diane and Michael met in the theatre. She first saw him play an attractive, outgoing character on stage that was far from his usual, contained personality and quickly fell for him.

They were opposites who were attracted to each other: Diane often brimmed with excitement and had a memorably giddy laugh, while Michael was a private, stolid writer who was too afraid to pursue that craft to any success. Diane liked to dance to the music that Michael would rather have listened to in solitude.

As the interviewed family members reconstruct the past in their own words, her inquisitive subjects try to decipher Polley's motive with making the documentary. They wonder who would care about their family's stories. 

The plot thickens when the siblings recall their whisperings about how Sarah, the youngest member of the Polley clan, was not Michael’s biological daughter. Each has their opinion on the matter, although they suggest that she was the result of a fling Diane had had while starring in a theatrical production in Montreal. 

The passage of time and the variance to knowing much about their mother’s supposed infidelity ensures that much of what the subjects say is merely speculative.

As Polley moves forward to inquire about this possibility, Stories We Tell becomes an endlessly intriguing rumour mill. The writer/director sets to fill in the gaps of her life but is greeted with doubts and discrepancies from those closest to her.

Among Diane’s potential suitors that the film hints toward include a lively red-haired actor named Geoff Bowes and Canadian film producer Harry Culken, a romantic figure with bushy, Einstein hair. Sarah interviews them both and discusses with them about their ephemeral, fleeting relationship with Diane. She goes from probing the people in her own family to investigating and making sense of an unexamined truth.

Polley’s interrogation of her family also becomes an interrogation of the skewed subjectivity of storytelling – and in that regard, documentary filmmaking. The writer/director includes home movies shot on super-8, presumably by her father. This archival footage’s legitimacy is tested when some of the filmed material turns out to feature other actors appearing in the roles of her family members.

The truth is hard to pin down due to the discrepancies in the storytelling. Memories of Diane and her suggested affair gain greater complexion, and to an extent become more mysterious, as all of the stories cannot reconcile with each other.

Stories We Tell is a big leap forward for Polley even after her impressive debut, 2007’s Away From Her. That film also examined the relationship of intimate lives whose shared memories clash fiercely.

It is significant that many of the people shadowed in the film are actors, whose job is to reveal deep truths under a guise of artifice. When Michael makes a heartfelt statement about his late wife near the end of the film, he admits that he was not acting when he said the proclamation. This sentence beckons one to ask how much that he has included in his writing was embellished for artistic purposes.

One could ask the same of Polley, who explores these intricacies of truth and memory with skilled aplomb but also has the cunning power as the creative director of the film to alter the audience’s impression of the story.

Blending real footage with the imagined and the truth with speculative fictions, these paradoxes of storytelling – both on a personal level, as well as a creative outlet – make Stories We Tell a film that remains piercingly honest even as its enigmas threaten to manipulate us, the audience. It is a feat of tender, intelligent filmmaking that’s not to be missed.