The Stories We Tell

The title of Sarah Polley's 2011, "mockumentary" is ambiguous.  "The Stories We Tell" signifies both narratives that we use to explain ourselves to the world, but, also, those stories that are excluded, concealed, and never spoken.   In the case of Sarah Polley, a renowned Canadian filmmaker super 8 images of an ostensibly happy childhood hide a baroque melodrama involving adultery, abuse, and hidden paternity.  Ms. Polley's mother, Diane, was flamboyant, beautiful actress -- she seems to have been manic and, probably, sexually insatiable.  Diane was briefly infamous throughout Canada as the first mother in that country to lose custody of her children as a result of adultery, a liaison conducted with Sarah Polley's (putative) father, Michael.  Polley's father played aggressive, decisive men on stage but, in actuality, he was retiring Casper Milquetoast fellow cursed with dashing good looks.  Diane abandoned her stage career -- she was undoubtedly too excitable to be much of an actress -- and tried to live as a housewife in Toronto with her second husband.  She had two new children, but soon became bored.  She returned to stage in Montreal where she started an affair with another actor, Harry Gulkin, also a famous figure in Canada; he produced the film The Lies My Father Told Me, a movie that won an academy award for best foreign film in the United States in the mid-seventies.  At the same time, distance revived Diane's passion for her husband, and she ended-up pregnant but unable to identify the father of her child.  After considering an abortion, Diane returned to Toronto and her husband where she had her baby, a daughter that she named Sarah.  Diane, then, died of some sort of fast-acting cancer and Sarah, who looks remarkably like her mother, was raised by Michael Polley, her depressed and reticent father.  Of course, it was later established that the flamboyant Harry Gulkin is Sarah Polley's actual father.  In the course of these revelations, Polley's two oldest siblings, her half-brother and half-sister, disclose that they were abused by servants hired to take care of them.  This lurid tale is narrated by the surviving principals, most notably Harry Gulkin and Michael Polley, both of whom were professional actors and impresarios and who deliver fine performance as themselves:  Gulkey is all regret and Byronic passion; Polley denigrates himself masochistically although with exceptional eloquence.  Polley shows us her family-members expressing embarrassment and concern at being filmed narrating these suppressed tales and, sometimes, she points the camera at her own face:  she nibbles her lips and looks pale and beautiful and emotionally ravaged.  The film's gimmick is its use of grainy, silent 8 mm footage to dramatize events in the past -- these materials are presented as authentic and they show interiors and city streets that seem to have been lovingly reconstructed to appear as they did in the late-seventies when the events occurring in the story took place.  The viewer accepts this footage as completely authentic until late in the film -- then, it becomes apparent that the pictures show things that are too intimate and too consequential for the movie's plot to have been accidentally captured on Super 8.  It is for this reason that I characterize the film as a "mockumentary" -- the documentary footage from the past is all staged, albeit with such precise casting that the people in the 8 mm film seem to be the younger counterparts of the old men and women that we see telling their stories in the present.  I'm ambivalent about this device, perhaps, because it fooled me for half the length of the movie.  Ultimately, the movie makes much ado about a domestic tragedy of the kind that every family conceals, or fails to conceal as the case may be.  The only difference between the secrets lurking in my family and the story on-screen is that the Polley's were Canadian royalty, notorious and beloved apparently in the Great White North so that the narrative has something of the frisson of gossip about the rich and famous.  (One should note that Canada is a humble country and the rich and famous in that nation live in modest suburban houses in modest suburban neighborhoods and remind me of paler, more blonde, and beautiful folks with whom I grew up in the Twin Cities.)  For my taste, the film contains too much self-disclosure and, paradoxically, one yearns to see those characters in the story who were unwilling to share their private misery with the camera -- for instance, what was Diane's first husband like?