Review of “The Stories We Tell”

Because I’m interested in narrative in all its forms and with all its quirks, my favorite movie this year is Sarah Polley’s The Stories We Tell (2012). Polley is one helluva storyteller, so good that her apparently simple initial story magically joins with other stories and then morphs into something that is unexpected, mysterious, and deeply affecting. While this is ostensibly a documentary, in fact it becomes an act of imagination, an act of personal resolution and love. The film raises many relevant questions for psychoanalysts. Where are the lines between facts and creative reconstructions? When does a recitation of facts or a group of observations become a coherent, created story? What makes a created story true? Where is “truth”—and who holds it—in the collective stories we tell? Whose stories get privileged? What is the relationship between a direct, naive narrative, and a story that is shaped by the creative vision and intellect of an auteur? These questions, raised in the film, are similar to the questions I ask when working with a family system.

Watching The Stories We Tell, like working with a family, is a bit like watching an amoeba in motion and in division: The apparently simple organism does not have a fixed shape; its boundaries are in constant expansion and contraction; it can envelop other organisms in a kind of seamless incorporative movement; and it can also divide itself into multiple organisms. Where exactly is the amoeba? That this film assumes this kind of sinuous and slippery process and asks these kinds of questions is quite a trick given that at the outset it seems perfectly straightforward.

At the beginning of the film, Sarah Polley gathers her father, four siblings, and close family friends to create a memory film about her mother Diane. Twenty years earlier when Sarah, the baby in the family, was 11, Diane died of cancer. Now as an adult,