High Praise for Sarah Polley’s Stories We Tell

Stories we Tell made a splash at last year’s Telluride. Now, the official reviews are coming up roses as the film sets to open. This is a film you should know as little about as possible before seeing it. It will no doubt be one of the best films of 2013 without breaking a sweat.

Stephanie Zacharek, now writing for the Village Voice, notices what New York Mag’s David Edelstein didn’t – she recognizes that Stories we Tell is Polley’s own:

It’s probably safe, at this point, to consider Polley a “Who knows what she’ll do next?” filmmaker, à la Michael Winterbottom. But Stories We Tell is so ingeniously constructed—and so nakedly intimate—that it may be a watershed. Polley has to execute a particularly delicate dance when it comes to dealing with the movie’s two significant father figures: Reticent, undemonstrative Michael, the man Polley has always considered her father, and the far more outgoing Harry Gulkin, a film producer who plays a pivotal role in this extremely tangled tale. Both men were dazzled by Diane in their youth, and neither has fully recovered from that love—although both failed to give her that elusive something she so desperately wanted out of life.

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But the closeness between the two is undeniable—they cuff each other like tiger and cub. Stories We Tell is, of course, Polley’s own story, an attempt to reconcile the fact and fiction of how she came into this world in the first place. Yet it’s anything but self-indulgent. She shapes the picture into a riddle that keeps us guessing every minute, and what she ends up with is so oddly shaped that it could be categorized as an experimental film. But it’s too warm, and too generous toward all its players, to be off-putting. There’s no way, Polley concludes, to tell a reliably true tale. But this particular story, which begins and ends with a woman’s face, feels true enough. Maybe reliability is overrated.

The Guardian’s Peter Bradshaw gives Stories we Tell five stars:

Stories We Tell is a cine-memoir of Polley’s parents, the British-born actor Michael Polley and Canadian actor and casting director Diane Polley. Using Super-8 home-movie footage, faux Super-8 reconstructions, interviews with siblings and, crucially, a memoir written by Michael, Polley has created a portrait of a marriage that is full of enormous richness, tenderness and emotional complexity.

Polley tackles painful issues with candour and tact. She has a gripping tale to tell. It’s a film that raises questions about the ownership of memory and ownership of narrative. On this point, and perhaps without fully realising it, she reveals herself to have been in something of a duel with film producer and family friend Harry Gulkin – albeit of the gentlest and most affectionate kind.