A terrific, post-modern look at storytelling and the fallibility of truth, Sarah Polley’s documentary catapults her into the ranks of great young filmmakers. Stories We Tell is a documentary, a mystery, a family exposé and a deeply moving look at tangled human relationships – all centered around Polley’s family life. She sits down with her own family – her father, actor Michael Polley, as well as her brother and sisters – to tell the collective story of her mother, Diane, who died when Sarah was 11.
The threads that emerge from these re-tellings show different elements of her father, a private man with a lot of creative ambitions left unfulfilled, and her mother, a vivacious beauty who loved being the centre of attention. However, the plot thickens when Polley’s siblings whisper about how Sarah may not have been Michael’s biological daughter, but a result of a fling Diane had. Polley tries to fill in the gaps of her life, but family and friends greet her with doubt and discrepancies. She moves from probing her own family to making sense of an unexamined part of her own life.
What makes the documentary so fascinating is how, even within the structure of a non-fiction film, the possibility of doubt lingers on every story twist. Like Errol Morris’s 1988 documentary The Thin Blue Line, she weaves together a story through different, sometimes irreconcilable versions of events. Looking at the tenuous strands that separate fact and fiction, Polley’s interrogation of her family turns into a look at the subjectivity of storytelling, as well as documentary filmmaking. (Even some of the archive footage featured in Stories We Tell turns illegitimate when it starts featuring actors in the role of the family.) It is both a riveting look at family secrets and an insightful analysis of truth in art and storytelling.