It starts with a man speaking, saying something
unusually profound about stories. Then you get the citation – Margaret Atwood.
The man is quoting a famous writer. The man himself is an actor, with some fame
in Canada. He is Michael Polley, father of actress Sarah Polley, who created
and directed Stories We Tell, a documentary – this documentary—about her own
family. The next shot is Sarah installing her dad in a fancy recording studio,
to do the voice-over for the film. He wrote his lines himself. But is the
Atwood epigraph his, or Sarah’s? She’s on camera, too, joking (maybe) that this
is both interview and “interrogation.” Stories We Tell claims to be a documentary.
Yet here we have started with two professional actors, on camera, speaking
words they have thought about beforehand. That’s not deception; it’s a signal.
Stories We Tell is more than it appears to be…but of course, the stories people
tell always are.
What it appears to be is a documentary about Sarah
Polley’s family, focusing on the life and untimely death (from cancer) of her
mother, Diane. The film comprises a collection of home movies, pictures, and
interviews with “storytellers” (as the credits call them) from Polley family
history. These are Sarah’s father, her siblings, some aunts and uncles, and
also various colleagues of Michael and Diane (both worked in show business).
Sarah, too, is heard asking questions and seen in both archival and present-day
footage. Her opening gambit with the storytellers is always the same, however:
tell what you know “from the beginning.” The beginning of what? Not Diane’s
life, exactly…more, perhaps, their family life. The story seems to really begin
when Diane and Michael meet. The children and friends predictably begin with
characterizations of the couple; Michael begins with his tale of their meeting.
The film is then off and running on a rather predictable track, especially for
anyone who follows show-business marriages. What makes Stories We Tell
interesting is that it will, in fact, jump that track. How it does so and why I
dare not reveal. I will only say that the ground on which Polley’s documentary
appears to rest shifts several times over its running. Remember those opening
signals…
All this may make it sound like the film is some
sort of trick. It isn’t. Some of its surprises are, in some ways, hiding in
plain sight. Polley’s aim is not to cheat or disorient, but rather to point up
the complexity of any given narrative. Any story is, by its very nature, an act
of interpretation, and it is that act of interpretation, rather than any
mystery around her mother, that seems to have captured Polley’s attention. She
never ducks the fact that her “documentary” is itself a carefully shaped and
constructed work of art. At least two interviewees, in fact, call her on it, on
camera. And note the way we get “pre-interview” scenes with the family
storytellers, self-consciously preparing to talk. One sister is sweating so
much with nerves that she changes her clothes. Two of the brothers clearly love
the idea of being filmed as raconteurs; they joke and twinkle their way through
their sections the way Shelby Foote and Wynton Marsalis did for Ken Burns.
Other storytellers object, hesitate, or simply lapse into silence. These
moments are important, for the people themselves are at least as much of the story as what they say.
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