The Stories We Tell: All narrators are unreliable

The Stories We Tell is a documentary of sorts. It attempts to piece together a portrait of stage actress and mom Diane Polley through the recollections of her family, friends and former lovers.  The film, directed by Diane’s daughter Sarah, is a compilation of on-camera interviews, emails and letters read out loud, and real images of the past interwoven with imagined moments acted out and shot to look like actual home movies. It’s narrated through a scripted voice-over by Sarah’s father who is himself an actor.

Several times in the movie siblings voice questions about the point of the film, asking who’d care enough to watch a feature about their family. Although Diane, who died of cancer when Sarah was very young, is a compelling, charismatic and somewhat mysterious figure, revelations about her life somehow become underwhelming and even a bit tedious. Ultimately, this exercise in perspective is deliberately self-aware, often pointing out the unreliability of memory and the bias of editing and directing that contribute to any version of a story.

In some ways, Sarah creates a very intimate and uncomfortable profile of her familial relationships, even having her father recount disturbing shortcomings in his marriage. On the other hand, she skips entire periods of time (from her own birth to her mother’s passing) and barely touches on her mother’s first marriage or her siblings’ trauma after their forced abandonment. The viewer is quite deliberately manipulated in this movie that, although adored by critics, feels a bit too much like a clever, if slightly precious and self-indulgent, film school experiment.

Others clearly have a much different take. That’s  just how we remember it.