Stories We Tell

This personal-narrative documentary from the talented actor/director Sarah Polley's has many of the flaws found in most personal-narrative documentaries. It feels like she set out with a subject she wanted to explore but not a clear vision of how to approach it. While this method can occasionally yield magnificent results in documentaries, more often, the end product is muddled, labored, and unfocused. Polley attempts to find layers of meaning in the story of her parents’ relationship by interviewing each surviving member of her immediate family and many others connected to them in one way or another. It is a good yarn but not the fascinating tale everyone telling it seems to think it is.  The film fails to convince us that the story merits a nearly two-hour documentary.

The personal-narrative sub-genre has exploded in popularity in the age of digital cinema. Everyone who has an interesting story buried in the family closet (and that covers pretty much all of humanity) now seems to think their story is universally relevant. But for every Capturing the Friedmans (Andrew Jarecki's incontestably fascinating 2003 personal documentary that dissected society's collective denial and paranoia about child molestation more acutely than any fiction film on the subject could), we now get literally thousands of intimate but irrelevant films about people’s personal histories.

This is not to imply that Stories We Tell is as disposable as most films of this type. In fact, the movie explores just the kind of long-dormant family secret I normally find irresistible. However, while I can imagine being riveted while sitting at a bar or coffee shop and having any of the people in this film recount the story, sitting through a film in which so many individuals get to have their say about each and every development in the narrative drags it out to a degree that can not be sustained. The story just is not all that complex, and, worst of all, Polley seems to think she is getting at something Rashomon-like in terms of how different people's versions of their history have something profound to say about truth and identity; but there just isn’t enough variation from each person’s account to make this the case. Polley also indulges in one of my biggest pet peeves with modern documentaries: she reenacts many of the events being described by the interview subjects. Though she takes the curse off through a smart reveal late in the picture, the damage has been done. I can never fully engage with a documentary that shows "archival" footage that could not exist unless staged after the fact. Filmmakers and critics always manage to find highfalutin justifications for this technique, but while this film comes closer than any I've yet seen at making it work, it still does more harm than good.