Sarah Polley solves the mystery of her own parentage in the slippery, poignant Stories We Tell
Film Features Watch This
Watch This offers movie recommendations inspired by new releases, premieres, current events, or occasionally just our own inscrutable whims. This week: In honor of the Netflix release of Sundance sensation Dick Johnson Is Dead, we’re looking back on other documentaries with deeply personal angles.
Stories We Tell (2012)
The hook is as immediate (and tawdry) as a tabloid headline or afternoon talk show: Canadian actor-director Sarah Polley (who aptly made her international breakthrough in a tale of complex familial circumstances, Atom Egoyan’s 1997 The Sweet Hereafter) dishes the dirt about her family and its history. Narrated by her father, the esteemed British-Canadian actor Michael Polley, Stories We Tell is both an exercise and an opportunity for the many members of the Polley family (whom we hear from, individually and collectively) to reconstruct the life of the late Diane McMillan and acknowledge the hole her 1990 death left in their lives.
For as long as she’s been alive, Polley has heard whispers about her parentage. Coming off the success of her Oscar-nominated Away From Her, she set out to explore the history of her mother, McMillan, partially as a way to address those years of gossip and hearsay—to head some theories off entirely, while getting at a truth that would leave all parties satisfied. Everyone has their say: her brother, her sister, her father, Diane’s friends and lovers. Their contradictory accounts and clashing remembrances hold equal footing; they’re part of Polley’s logical attempt to solve the mystery of her own origins. Memory, her film acknowledges, isn’t fixed; it’s a protean and elusive phenomenon that allows us to convert the objective into the subjective.
All these things percolate in the mix alongside personal dissatisfaction, Montréal sensuality, and exquisite ’70s fashions. There’s an ambition to Stories We Tell, dramatically and narratively, that calls to mind Orson Welles’ F For Fake—this is a similarly tricky film that has its cake and eats it, too. The reenactments are shot on 8mm, and for viewers of a certain age, the texture of that medium is almost synonymous with memory; it triggers the same synapses as childhood reminiscence. Much of this footage is a re-creation of possible events shot years after the fact, and the Diane Elizabeth McMillan it presents is an actor presenting a physical embodiment of the concept that the many Polleys have spent time trying to express. But though she’s not an actual part of the family, she allows the viewer an unexpected (and unprecedented) degree of empathy for the real Diane and for the real (and reel) Polleys.
Rational and reasoned and blessedly Canadian, Stories We Tell lays the twists and turns of the Polley family history out for all to see, encouraging the viewer to analyze, dissect, and unravel the many skeins of their own family history in turn. Simple questions, the whos and the whys especially, do not always yield simple answers, and it’s a testament to the story that Polley and her family tell that when catharsis does arrive, it is revelatory and confusing and unexpected. No two families share the same exact story, but each step taken—every choice made of the near-infinite possibilities in creating and raising another life—resonates with someone, somewhere.
Availability: Stories We Tell is currently streaming on Amazon Prime and on Tubi TV (with ads). It can also be rented or purchased digitally from Google Play, iTunes, YouTube, Microsoft, Redbox, Fandango, and VUDU.
17 Comments
Man I love this movie. It would be remarkable just for its frankness – there are a lot of emotions at play, but everybody seems candid and loving throughout the movie (which did strike me as fundamentally Canadian). But there are also so many wonderful insights and turns of phrase – Polley recognizing her “gummy grin” in other family members, the fantastically specific references to Toronto and Montreal workplace cultures, Michael Polley remarking that for some reason he used their 8mm camera to record landscapes rather than people. I also come from a family where my mother’s unexpected death left a big hole, and when I saw this movie all I could think was, “This is exactly how I wish my family could approach tragedy, and we just can’t.” It’s sad but also genuinely inspirational in that sense.
This movie always wrecks me. Sarah Polley is so smart & sharp as a filmmaker and there’s so much real love here even among the loss.
Such a great, well-designed movie. I always look forward to a new Sarah Polley movie, and really wished she put out more films.
I was one of the people who thought the home movie b-roll was real until 95% of the way through lol. I love this movie. One of my favorites from one of my favorite directors.
Boy as a documentary filmmaker, this film is one of those works that has left me extremely conflicted. In terms of technique and narrative, it’s a brilliant, masterful work. The thing that bothered me were the ethics of revealing her family secrets. I just was not sure as to her motives, and she even mulls this over in the film, which feels like having one’s cake and eating it too by telling the story, but also making is clear that one isn’t totally at ease about doing it. Either one should or should not do it, and in the end, it felt dare I say, cynical.But the thing is I know I’m in the minority here, and it’s as much a philosophical thing. I’m less enamored of films by filmmakers about themselves (Ross McElwee, I’m looking at you). There are some I adore, such as the brilliant Silverlake Life, in which the filmmaker documents his own death from AIDS. But this film just missed it for me. Which is a shame because I do deeply admire Sarah Polley’s work, and want her to do more documentaries.
I haven’t seen it, so I can’t make a judgement either way. But when you say “The thing that bothered me were the ethics of revealing her family secrets.” Do you mean including them in a film at all, regardless of her family giving consent? Or do you mean, she revealed things that she knew of, without asking them? The 2nd is obviously unethical, but if it’s the first, why do you feel it may have been so? Is it just her uncertainty? (I understand that viewpoint a bit. As if by feeling the twinges of guilt around a subject you should know you are doing something you think is dubious and so should just not do it. You should only do this if you feel it is a right thing to do.)
The motivation for the film is to get to the bottom of family secrets (her mother’s life (lives), her parentage) so it’s kind of an odd criticism in this case. Without family secrets, there would be no film at all
I need to re-watch the film, since it’s been long enough for me. But at the time I watched it, when I excited the theater, I remember the first thought that came to my mind was, I wasn’t entirely sure she wasn’t telling this story, because she thought it was the kind of story that would get a lot of notice. I just couldn’t shake the suspicion that beneath it all, she saw the film as a good career move.
So what? Why can’t a person make a deeply personal film and know it ALSO be a good career move? Isn’t the goal of a documentary filmmaker to have a good career? To continue to make movies? I think you need to take a look at your criticism here. Art isn’t just art while someone is toiling away in anonymity. What is so wrong with her deciding that she can tell HER story? It seems you have an issue with people exploring family secrets altogether, because your criticism seems to suggest a person is not allowed to do so, and that’s just not true.
An interesting and personal quandary. I mean it begs the question of why people tell stories at all, and the ethics surrounding that. Is the story “pure” if the artist is ambivalent about it’s notoriety and their own future success? Or is that just a façade we put on things so they feel more authentic, and less tied into the business surrounding art? Is it wrong to create art because you think it’s a good career move? If so, and you acknowledge that the art you are creating will be good for your career, is it tainted? Can you even separate the two, while doing art in a capitalist society? Should you? I mean ultimately whether you think her actions are unethical really has to do with what you think the artist’s responsibility is to their subjects, and whether personal success is something an artist should be motivated by at all. I can’t comment as I haven’t seen it, but I find the criticism interesting. Thanks for sharing.
There’s some important context missing here. From Polley herself on the decision to make the film: “In 2007 I was on set in Montreal, shooting a scene for the film Mr. Nobody. I received a phone call from a friend warning me that a journalist had found out a piece of information about my life that I had kept a secret for a year. I got in touch with the journalist and begged him not to print the story. It was a story that I had kept secret from many people in my life including my father. It took some time and many tears to convince the journalist not to print the story within the week, but I left that conversation convinced that it was not a secret I could keep for long, and that if I wanted the people in my life and outside my life to know the story in my own words, I would have to take action.”I respect the impulse to demur in favor of privacy, but it doesn’t seem like privacy was a luxury that she and her family were being afforded. I’d also argue the decision to include her own struggle with revealing these secrets was absolutely integral to the themes. This isn’t just a documentary about an affair: this is a documentary about telling stories. Polley is a witness as much as any interviewee. The angst of telling her story filmically is just as important as the angst her family felt telling theirs on the other side of the lens.
I really appreciate you sharing this with me. I only regret I cannot say I’m totally convinced that her choice was the correct one. I don’t know, I just don’t like the medium being used in this way. She convinced a journalist to kill a story, and then she tells the story herself? I don’t really see a great difference between the two, because both involve a person who was dead and had no say. There’s something about telling this kind of story, on the big screen, for profit and for awards, that I just take issue with. I should say, this reflects more about me, than it should about her. It reflects my approach to the non-fiction practice, and I don’t for one minute begrudge anyone who adores this film. It just didn’t click with me.
You don’t see a difference between you and your family being able to tell your side of a painful story in the method of your choosing rather than having it be a tabloid piece? (This wasn’t the only journalist btw; she’s done interviews at length on the subject. It’s also in the movie, not sure if you missed that part.) We’re not talking about an S-Town here: This is a person choosing to share a story about the circumstances of *her own conception* and the consequences for her own life and the people around her. A key point of the movie that is argued pretty effectively is that it’s not just her mother’s story. The rest of the individuals involved seem to corroborate that.It’s also odd to me to call someone out for doing something you perceive to be unethical and exploitative of their deceased mother (pretty serious personal criticisms) then claiming it says more about you than the person you’re critiquing. As you say, can’t have your cake and eat it too.If you don’t like the movie, you don’t like the movie. People are allowed to have different tastes and that’s a-ok with me. Just think that your critique is not well-reasoned/compassionate/informed.
Watching a movie so personal and so well made and then thinking that she was chasing clout or rebranding is strange to me.
I remember when Polley was Ramona.
This film is a brilliant meditation on the impossibility of being completely objective
I have been interested in seeing this movie since it came out. I kept thinking it would show up on one of my many cable channels, but it never did. Seeing that it was on Amazon excited me, until I looked & discovered I would still have to pay to rent or buy it. I hate it when Amazon teases me like that.