Stories We Tell: Sarah Polley’s Meta Masterpiece

Director Sarah Polley’s documentary Stories We Tell revolves around her parentage. Can I leave it at that, and tell you no more? I’d like every viewer to have a chance to experience the movie’s slow reveals, rather than have its mysteries summarized in a few neat declarative sentences. Suffice it to say, there are family secrets. At one point in the film, Polley tells her sister “I can’t figure out why I’m exposing us all in this way. It’s really embarrassing.”

But while the secret, which Polley herself didn’t know until 2006, is titillating, it’s not as intriguing as the style of the filmmaking, which leans more toward creative non-fiction than traditional documentary. Stories We Tell is blatantly sly, nudging the viewer to question everything they’re hearing and seeing.
It’s also playfully meta—Polley’s considerable celebrity in Canada has an obvious impact on some of the secret-keepers—but without being mannered or precious. Yet despite this somewhat elastic structure, Polley renders her portrait of family love and identity in such a heartfelt, pure way that at the end, I had tears running down my face. As a narrative, Stories We Tell isn’t entirely trustworthy, but ultimately, it’s emotional content can absolutely be trusted.

The most obviously captivating member of the Polley clan is one we glimpse only in photographs and home movies—Diane, the actress mother who died of cancer when Polley was 11 and just starting her own acting career as the star of the popular Canadian television series Road to Avonlea. But the director herself, hovering on the sidelines, is equally seductive. You’ll likely fall for the mind behind this strange project, presuming you didn’t fall for Sarah Polley long ago, when she was the coolest girl in Hollywood, starring in movies like 1999’s Go or 2000’s The Claim or later, when she turned into the kind of formidable young woman who could successfully adapt Alice Munro for the screen (into Away From Her) before she turned 27.