The Reel Critic: Stories We Tell

Why do we tell stories? How do we tell stories? How do the stories we tell shape our identity? These are the questions at the center of filmmaker Sarah Polley’s 2012 documentary feature, the aptly named Stories We Tell. Polley asks each of her family members (and a few family acquaintances) to tell “the whole story” of her late mother, Diane. She stitches the resulting narratives together to reveal contradictions that complicate the very nature of her family and of her place in it. Interspersed are beautiful home videos depicting everything from Polley’s parents’ honeymoon to her first swim. This footage not only diversifies the visuals of the interviews, but also makes the quality of the videos themselves striking. Shot on Super 8 film, each sepia-toned pixel is meant to evoke deep nostalgia. These images tell you that you are watching the past and that you should miss it.

We are conditioned over and over again to accept that documentaries deal in some way with “real life,” and this assumption unavoidably impacted how I watched the film. Many elements of this film do seem to reinforce its documentary label, including the interviews, home video footage and even Sarah’s father, Michael, who provides some semblance of narration. This is all familiar. But as the story unravels, a filmic self-awareness emerges that enables it to defy traditional documentary conventions.

For starters, we see the camera setups for each interview and get some candid banter between Sarah and her family before the “official” interviews begin. “Are you nervous?” she asks each of her subjects. In addition, we actually see Michael onscreen, reading his narration in a studio. At various points Polley interrupts and asks him to repeat phrases. In this way we are watching the production of something we are accustomed to accepting at face value.

And then there’s the issue of the home videos mentioned above. As the film rolls along it becomes highly suspect that Polley’s family happens to have perfect footage of all the touched upon events. It turns out that all of these “home videos” are actually reenactments, complete with actors and actresses playing younger versions of the different family members. Reenactments are nothing new to the documentary genre. However, the presentation of these scenes as authentically old, as imbued with a sort of nostalgia reserved for sacred relics of times past, causes the viewer to think about filmmaking choices that are so often meant to be invisible. All these examples of genre-bending techniques add to a ‘meta’ framework that prepares us to play an active role in considering why this story is being told in this particular way.

It becomes clear that Polley’s subjects each consider their own versions of the story to be more true than the others’. In spite of all this, the very presence of multiple truths casts doubt over each of them. So the film’s meaning actually seems to have very little to do with the content of the stories (however emotionally compelling we find them) and more to do with the storytelling process itself. Polley begs us to value multiple truths and acknowledge the subjectivity of human experience.

Stories We Tell is a beautiful portrait of the way people frame the same stories differently in order to make their own pasts, presents and futures coherent. Each character has rationalized information about Polley’s mother, realizations that surfaced many years after her death, in ways that maintain the coherence of their own stories. When Michael talks about how hard it was to lose his wife after being with her for 25 years, I can’t help wondering if he is also referring to the difficulty of dealing with the changing nature of his own truth about his wife in the face of new information.

What begins as a narrative about remembering the filmmaker’s own mother evolves into a tale about unearthing family secrets and ends up as something of a commentary about our human obsession for seeking truth. To end on a quote from one of Polley’s sisters: “I guess that to me is another misconception. That there is a state of affairs or a thing that actually happened and we have to construct what actually happened in the past … you don’t ever get to an answer.”