Stories We Tell

After watching this film, I’m surprised that the critical praise for it is so pronounced. It looks good and the use of archival footage/re-enactment is done well, but the story is just not that compelling. In it Sarah Polley interviews different friends and family members about her late mother. During this process, she starts to ask questions about a longstanding rumor that the man who raised her is not actually her biological father. Overlaid with this is a philosophical discussion of narrative and the discrepancies that exist when we tell stories. My basic problem with the film is that the story at the heart of it is just not very interesting. There are some moving moments and some interesting aspects of the lives of the subjects of the film, but it doesn’t really seem like it warrants a film.

The discussion about the search for truth is poorly done in my opinion. The way Polley gets here is by pointing out discrepancies in the stories people are telling about her mother. The problem is that there are surprisingly few discrepancies in their stories. It almost seems like this was added as an afterthought to make up for the fact that the story itself is not that compelling. It seems to me that if the story was better, it wouldn’t need this. Similarly, a film about narrative inconsistency could be based on stories about any event. All the stories would require is significant difference.

The film doesn’t do a good job of explaining who is talking and what their relationships are to Diane Polley. At the end of the film, there is as sequence where it runs through all the people who talked about her throughout the film. I didn’t know who several of these people were.

I like the interviews with Michael Polley. That guy is interesting. I also like the idea of using him as a narrator. At one point, he reads an email he wrote to his daughter about the film. He too seems suspicious of the theme of truth-telling vs. storytelling.

Gut reaction: 2.5/5

One film I liked more: Capturing the Friedmans

One film I liked less: The Aristocrats