One of the absolute richest films of the year, Sarah Polley’s Stories We Tell is so many wonderful and fascinating things, all at the same time. It is a deconstruction of documentary form, an examination of human memory and perception, a study into the construction of stories and the act of storytelling, and a beautiful, emotionally complex tale of family and familial relationships. It is on that simplest and most direct level that the film hit me the hardest, as the intensely personal narrative Polley weaves about her own family’s past ultimately reveals itself to have wildly insightful and extremely universal things to say about all families, particularly in the way we view our parents.
The film forced me, near the end, to come to a bit of a revelation about my own mother, and some of the ways I have maybe been unfair to her in the time since my father’s passing, and I think any time a film can give us moments of clarity like that – especially a documentary that comes from such a deeply personal place to begin with – the work is obviously something very, very special. No matter how one ultimately views or interprets the film, all of it is executed with unbelievably inspired flairs of creativity, and realized with nothing but the deepest pathos. Polley has crafted a documentary masterpiece for the ages, one that transcends not only the limits of the documentary form, but even, perhaps, of filmmaking itself.
Stories We Tell is now available on DVD.
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