Stories We Tell opened in NYC this week (it opens in select theaters across the country next week.) My wife and I both enjoyed it, but I have to say I was not as deeply impressed as were the New York Critics, who are falling over themselves to praise this film (probably because it seems to them the kind of film that “smart” people should like.) A.O. Scott went so far as to claim the term “documentary” was completely inadequate to capture the marvelous grandeur of this film. Nonsense! It’s a nice little documentary in which Sarah Polley explores the mystery of her own birth father, told from the perspectives of everyone who was touched by the mystery – her siblings, the father she grew up with, and those that knew her mother.

Stories We Tell is fun to watch – there’s something about it that echos the charm of most average families and their patterns of interaction. It’s a well-made documentary, sometimes funny, occasionally moving, and above all very human and unpretentious. However, I did not find its exploration of story-telling, or how stories form in the mind to be at all fascinating or deep or compelling. Indeed, I’m not sure the film really had anything much to say on this topic. I felt that almost everyone interviewed was more or less on the same page, factually and emotionally, with regard to her mother and everything that transpired, and that the main appeal of the film was its lovely technique and the simple, charming, down-to-earth quality of its story. When compared to a very similar but vastly superior documentary like My Architect, particularly noting that film’s exquisite sense of mystery, macabre, moral ambiguity and unresolved emotional threads, Stories We Tell suddenly seems rather pedestrian, and even a tad dull. 

Plus, Stories We Tell has a strange aftertaste, because the film comes across as a kind of “gift” to her non-birth father who she grew up with, and a bit of a “diss” toward her discovered birth father, who was the one person in the story who actually had certain views that diverged (marginally) from the consensus. The problem is, none of this is explained, and because you like her birth father Harry (he and the mother form the compelling emotional center of the story) it feels a bit strange and even wrong that he gets frozen out in the end.

I have a lot of respect for Sarah Polley, both as an actress and as a filmmaker. Stories We Tell is an interesting artistic exercise, one that I would never need to see again, but one I’m glad to have seen once. I would recommend it – just don’t expect more than a nice little, family story.