Review – Stories We Tell

Stories We Tell challenges the boundaries of its documentary format. Rather than collect a range of memories and retellings to uncover the ‘truth’ behind her mother’s life, Sarah Polley embraces and even celebrates the inconsistencies between each account. This is probably the greatest strength of the film – despite Sarah’s insistence, from behind the camera, that each interviewee is given equal representation, hers is the bias that over-shadows all others. She employs actors to recreate home movies, allows her father Michael Polley to supply the narration, and of course has full creative control over what makes the cut. But rather than taking away from the power of the film, the transparency of her decisions takes audiences beyond the story being told and into the much larger, and frankly more interesting, process of how it is that any story comes to be.

This is a film that takes risks, and while many of these risks prove to have been worth taking, there are some aspects that fail to come across as the director presumably intended. The use of Super 8 footage to recreate events from her childhood is perhaps slightly indulgent, and the overall length of the film begins to do a disservice to the story. There are some genuinely funny, surprising, and moving moments in the film, but they can be somewhat infrequent. The line between in-depth and indulgent is often toed but rarely crossed, and this flirtation is far more forgivable once Polley confesses that her motivations for making the film were not clear even to herself during its production.

I would struggle to provide one brief sentence to answer the question ‘why should I see this film?’ There is no one thing that makes Stories We Tell stand out, but instead it has something of an honest and organic charm that leaves with you the impression that you have seen something worthwhile. If you are looking for a movie to pass a bit of time on a lazy Sunday afternoon, this probably won’t be it. Stories We Tell will suck you in, it will command your attention, and whether or not you decide that you liked it, you will almost definitely appreciate it.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ytq4VZ2Nyxg&w=400]