Stories We Tell
Composite Score: 83.17
Featuring: Michael Polley, John Buchan, Mark Polley, Joanna Polley, Harry Gulkin, Susy Buchan, Cathy Gulkin, Marie Murphy, Robert MacMillan, Anne Tait, Deirdre Bowen, and Victoria Mitchell
Director: Sarah Polley
Writers: Sarah Polley and Michael Polley
Genres: Documentary, Drama, Biography
MPAA Rating: PG-13 for thematic elements involving sexuality, brief strong language, and smoking
Box Office: $2.64 million worldwide
Why should you Watch This Film?
Stories We Tell is Sarah Polley’s documentary about storytelling and memory, framed around her family’s and acquaintances’ stories about her mother. The film is told almost entirely through interviews and narration by Sarah’s father Michael, exploring her parents’ relationship before she was born, the circumstances of her birth, her mother’s death from cancer, and her desire to know whether Michael truly was her biological father. By framing the narrative around interviews and memories, Polley takes a story that is deeply personal and, while inviting the audience into her life, allows them to ponder their own perceptions of reality and memories and relationships. It is a deeply engrossing documentary, not just for the family drama or the heartfelt narrative but for the ways that it asks the audience to reflect on their own lives and stories they might have told themselves or others.
Why shouldn’t you Watch This Film?
There is a level on which Stories We Tell might feel a little too voyeuristic for comfort. Sarah Polley invites her audience to experience and bear witness to an incredibly delicate and personal family drama in the story of her own parentage and her mother’s life and death. While the film is designed to comment on the ways we process and tell stories about our own lives and contains nuggets of wisdom for any audience, I totally understand viewers who would rather not have known so much about the filmmaker and her family and who choose to skip this one to avoid finding out. Since it is Polley’s own choice and seems to be part of her own coping and processing, I don’t have any issue recommending this documentary, but I understand if you’d rather not partake.
So wait, why should you Watch This Film?
For me, Sarah Polley accomplishes her goal to near perfection in Stories We Tell, telling a story through her interviewees (mostly family members and family friends) that engages and entertains while also pointing to deeper truths about the ways we process our own lives. By telling almost the entire story through interviews and her father’s own narration, she forces the audience to grapple with inconsistencies and face the subjectivity of memory head-on. Each person has their own version of events and their own understanding of who her mother was, and even when brought together, she leaves us with an intentionally (I think) picture of who her mother was and what her own feelings on the whole thing are. The bits of “archive footage” that she throws in to accentuate the stories being told by the interviewees serve to deepen this effect thanks to a somewhat surprising break in the fourth wall at the film’s end that unifies the story being told about her mother and the point that Polley is seeking to make about perception, memory, and storytelling. It’s one of the most brilliantly executed documentaries that I’ve ever watched, and I’m happier for it.
Sarah Polley’s Stories We Tell serves its dual purpose of allowing the filmmaker to process revelations about her own life and inviting the audience to process and examine their own pasts and stories as well in a beautiful picture worthy of its place among the greats. Though its deeply personal narrative might leave some audience members wishing that they had never learned so much about a stranger, Polley’s genuine desire to share her own life endears the piece to its viewers well. This film is currently available to stream with ads via Freevee on Amazon or to rent on most other streaming services if you’d like to check it out.
