Movie Reviews for Writers: Stories We Tell

While technically Stories We Tell isn’t a movie about a writer (instead an actor), it is 100 percent a movie about storytelling, and that is part and parcel of the writer’s craft. 

In this amazing documentary Sarah Polley tries to make sense of her family history in a sort of Rashomon style by interview, well, more like interrogating her family and letting viewers settle the “mystery” of it all in their own minds, sort of like Poirot not having the big reveal scene. And it works. Tremendously. 

The movie begins with this quote from Margaret Atwood: 

“When you’re in the middle of a story, it isn’t a story at all but rather 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 are 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 someone else.”

The opening scene itself is a bit of a reveal as well, as Polley’s dad, Michael, walks very slowly upstairs to record his own voice-over for the film. The things he reveals make almost no sense until the unfolding of the film itself, and that’s completely intentional. 

If the theme of Stories We Tell is anything, it’s this:

Stories don’t make sense at the beginning. They only make sense in the act of telling and in the act of looking back, and even then, it’s all pieces and parts (thank you Rashomon) and open to interpretation. 

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