Sarah Polley (2012)

As an autobiographical documentary, Stories We Tell is fascinating, not least because the family members and friends who are the talking heads question and sometimes take exception to what Sarah Polley is up to in making the film, and what she’s asking them to do.  It’s no less absorbing as a drama – in the development of the characters you’re watching on screen, in the narrative’s twists and revelations.   What amounts to the examination of documentary technique and the exposure of its artifice isn’t at all academic and doesn’t in the least detract from the drama – it enriches it.   Polley mixes real home movies with simulated footage of her parents and others.  When I first saw it this summer, I was blind – until a sequence in which Polley is shown directing the actress (Rebecca Jenkins) who’s pretending to be her mother Diane – to this combination.  Having watched Stories We Tell a second time, I can’t understand how I couldn’t tell the genuine and mock home movie material apart:  the actors pretending to be the true-life dramatis personae are clearly not the real thing (and are mostly not very good).   Diane Polley, an actress herself and the pivotal character in the story, died of cancer shortly before her youngest child Sarah’s eleventh birthday in early 1990.  Her second husband Michael Polley is still alive, as are Diane’s four other children from her two marriages.  Stories We Tell is partly about the mystery – and power – of someone who is able yet unable to speak for herself.

There’s also black-and-white footage of the real Diane performing ‘Ain’t Misbehavin’’ with an adapted lyric:  Sarah Polley inserts this shortly after the viewer has learned about the end of Diane’s first marriage and her subsequent loss of custody of the two children of that marriage.  The changed words of ‘Ain’t Misbehavin’’ are all about keeping things in good financial order.  Diane is a likeable though not especially brilliant performer – it’s when she giggles and says she muffed the last line of ‘Ain’t Misbehavin’’ that the vividness nearly everyone remembers her for – however much their memories of other things may vary – flashes through the screen.  At the heart of Stories We Tell is the question of Sarah Polley’s paternity.  It turns out that her biological father was not Michael but Harry Gulkin, an independent film producer with whom Diane had an affair in 1978, while she was away from the Polley family home in Toronto, appearing in a stage play in Montreal.   Diane had fallen in love with Michael Polley in the mid-1960s when she saw him as Mick in Pinter’s The Caretaker and they appeared together in Sartre’s The Condemned of Altona.   It seems she never stopped loving him but that Michael was unable to reciprocate either emotionally or, in the longer term, physically.  He frustrated his wife in other ways too:  once they’d had two children of their own, he gave up acting to work for an insurance company (this too gives a retrospective apt edge to the ‘Ain’t Misbehavin’’ lyric); Diane thought Michael a talented writer but he didn’t pursue that either.   Sarah’s discovery in 2007 that Harry was her biological father, and her breaking this news to Michael, caused the latter to put his thoughts to Sarah in the form of a letter.  This seems to have been the trigger for his getting down to sustained writing.  It’s Michael’s memoir, which he reads under Sarah’s close direction of his line readings, which provides the narrative framework to Stories We Tell.

Michael reasonably warns Sarah at one point that the family memoir she’s making is bound to be partial because she’ll choose what to keep in and what to lose from the hours of footage she’ll have to edit.  He is largely co-operative with the project, however – in striking contrast to Harry Gulkin, who doesn’t approve of it at all.   In Harry’s view, Sarah’s intention to give ‘equal weight’ to the testimonies of different members of her family is thoroughly misconceived.  As he sees it, the only people qualified to remember what happened between him and Diane Polley are the two directly involved ‘and one of them is dead’.  It’s bizarre that Harry appears to see Diane’s life as consisting purely of that part of it which included him.  The irony is that it’s Sarah’s anxiety about Harry’s threatening to publish an article about her paternity – as the relationship between the newly-discovered father and daughter is beginning to get more complicated – that appears to have been a trigger to her making Stories We Tell.    Nevertheless, Harry evidently agreed to her filming reconstructions of key conversations between them, including the one in which Harry tells her he’s her father; just as Michael consents to re-enact the meeting with Sarah at which she tells him he’s not her biological parent.   This viewer shared the two men’s unease with Sarah Polley’s creating these sequences – although Michael shows in his big scene that he’s not lost his acting ability – and it’s not only in them that her uncompromising approach is in evidence.

Polley’s siblings (in fact half-siblings) Mark and Joanna sometimes suggest that, while they love Sarah, they got used from an early stage to her being the star of the family and became tolerant of her determination to get her own way.  Yet it must partly be their trust of her that makes all five half-siblings – they also include John and Susy Buchan, the children of Diane’s first marriage, and Harry’s other daughter, Cathy – so engaging to watch and listen to.   The humour and variety of what they have to say (all the more striking because I first saw Stories We Tell the day after I saw Before Midnight) is delightful, often poignant too.   There’s a particularly gripping moment when Joanna says that she thinks Michael did badly by Diane so that she’s glad that her mother was loved by Harry – but that she still feels it was Michael who Diane most wanted to be loved by.

Michael Polley, who was born and grew up in England, is remarkably candid and incisive not only about his own shortcomings as a husband but also about what he thinks attracted Diane to him in the first place.   He believes that Diane fell in love with him because of the dynamic characters he was able to be on stage but couldn’t be in real life.  When she made this film, Polley was taking a break from adapting Margaret Atwood’s Alias Grace for the screen and Stories We Tell opens with the following quote from Atwood’s novel:

‘When you are in the middle of a story it isn’t a story at all, but only a confusion; a dark roaring, a blindness, a wreckage of shattered glass and splintered wood; like a house in a whirlwind, or else a boat crushed by the icebergs or swept over the rapids, and all aboard powerless to stop it. It’s only afterwards that it becomes anything like a story at all. When you’re telling it, to yourself or to someone else.’

Sarah Polley’s achievement in Stories We Tell is to convey not just the rich interweaving of the lives of members of a family but also that the revelations about her parentage don’t mean that her family life as a girl was a lie:  it was, as it were, a different truth.  What’s so sad about Diane Polley’s concealment of her relationship with Harry Gulkin is that it was rooted in the traumatic experience of the end and aftermath of Diane’s first marriage and, as Joanna Polley suggests, her mother’s determination that her second husband was going to be the main man.   Michael’s memoir includes the interesting notion that, in the nothingness of many generations that preceded him, he was, if not personally there, always going to be there – and that individuals are, in that sense, born complete.  I’m not sure how this squares with what he says to Sarah late on in the film:  that if she had been his biological daughter she’d have been utterly different.

4 July 2013