Sarah Polley’s latest work as a director, Stories We Tell, is a tough movie to describe. Is it a documentary? Is it a dramatic work? Clearly there’s a little bit of both going on, and the ambiguity is a large part of the point. What is a story? What relation do stories have to the truth? Are our memories reliable? How much do our memories make up who we are? How much does where we come from make up who we are? These are some of the questions that Polley explores by bringing together her entire family and a smattering of family friends and interviewing them about her mother, who passed away when the filmmaker was a very young girl. Well, she explores them by doing interviews as well as by mixing the interview footage with grainy home video footage that may be more than meets the eye.
What starts off as a daughter’s attempt at connecting with a lost parent soon turns into something of a mystery story, which then turns into something of a family drama, which then turns into a Meta exploration of exactly whose story is being told. Like all good documentaries (or at least pseudo-documentaries) do, Stories We Tell takes you on a journey. It doesn’t just examine a subject and give you interesting facts about it, it takes unexpected turns, goes off on tangents, and never rigidly forces itself to remain the same sort of movie it started out as. It’s messy and exploratory like real life, and it keeps you on your toes by unearthing surprises and documenting delightful moments of happenstance.
Given the personal connection the filmmaker has to the subject being explored, Stories We Tell is pretty dang effective dramatically as well. The deceased mother haunts this film and all of its subjects like a specter, and the heaviness of the unfinished business that exploring her life causes to bubble back to the surface eventually begins to not only weigh on, but sometimes break down those being interviewed. That we’re talking to an intelligent, artistic, introspective group of people only serves to heighten and clarify the struggles that they’re going through. Polley’s previous film as a director, Take This Waltz, left a fairly bad taste in my mouth, but Stories We Tell is good enough to instantly wash all that away. If you get a chance to take this one in, it’s definitely an opportunity you shouldn’t pass up.
