Our Movie Review: Stories We Tell (2012)

Why we watched it: read positive reviews

His rating: 4 out of 5 stars

Her review: I have been reading good things about this film for a long while before we finally watched it and I’m so glad we did. This is a gentle film, the topics and people handled carefully and respectfully when it would be easy to be hamhanded and heavy with it. Sarah Polley proves herself to be insightful and engaging as she but directs this documentary of her mother and what turns out to be the search for her father. But as she does it, she breaks down the fourth wall of the documentary genre and lets us see how it works as well as the questions that are asked, even if some of them are not answered.

Most of the people interviewed, or the storytellers as Polley calls them, are her family and the closeness she shares with her siblings is apparent, as is the close relationship she shares with the father who raised her, a man the documentary tells us over and over again is difficult to get close to. Additionally, her mother, dead from cancer, remains an elusive sylph, so full of life yet so entirely gone.

The music, the way this documentary is filmed, the interviews, the use of letters and of recreated footage all meld together to make a touching, engaging and gentle film about what it is to be a family and how stories work to help create them.

His review: One of the aspects of (good) documentaries that I really appreciate it is how they can take what may seem to be a simple story, and slowly peel back the layers, revealing the complexity of life. These true stories are more fascinating because they are real—I often leave just amazed at what humans can and will do.

On its surface, this film explores a family history that may seem uninteresting to outsiders. Polley is profiling her mother, and the affair that lead Polley in search of her biological father. This story, itself, is interesting to me, as Polley moves back and forth as director and subject. She creates a caring, yet honest portrait of her mother and the two men that Polley calls ‘father’. Even when the mystery if resolved, the film doesn’t end there, but continues to show that just finding her biological father is not a simple, happy ending.

Polley that postions this documentary beyond her family secret, though, by showing the nature of creating a documentary such as interviewees reluctance or direct questioning of the point or value of the documentary; or more literally, by pulling the camera back to reveal that the home movies used throughout the documentary are in fact staged reenactments. By allowing us to see the different perspectives her family and friends have about her mother and her choices, Polley is asking us to think about the ways storytelling defines, and reflects, our perspectives.

This is an engaging film because is it well structured, using the pathos of a personal story to quietly engage broader questions. And yet, it is at its heart a loving, honest portrait of a unique women, a gift from a daughter.