Capturing the
Polleys
by Thomas Delapa
For critics and
serious filmgoers who’ve given up on the Academy Awards, especially after last year's Seth MacFarlane fatuous hosting fiasco, here’s another reason
to shrug and say "I told you so": Despite being one of the best and most
talked-about documentaries of 2013, Sarah Polley’s Stories We Tell was shockingly shut out of the Oscar nominations.
The Canadian
actress/director may take cold comfort in the fact that the Oscars have
regularly been on the wrong side of cinema history. Leading the nominations for worst Oscar snubs: Alfred Hitchcock (nil directing awards), Francis Ford
Coppola for The Godfather (loser to Cabaret’s Bob Fosse), and the snub of
all snubs, Orson Welles’ nonpareil Citizen
Kane bested by How Green Was My
Valley. Vice versa, does anyone outside of Robert Osborne remember the
lachrymose Luise Rainer, winner of back-to-back best actress Oscars in the
1930s? And post Y2K, let’s just fugetabout
The Departed, the noxious 2006
best picture winner that should be left to sleep with the fishes.
Almost as myopic in Oscar oversights have been the erratic, often obscure choices
over the decades in the Best Foreign Film category. Since the Academy only allows one entry per country each year, voters are forced to dole out the nominations in globally “let’s
all share” fashion, not so unlike ribbons handed out to all the kiddies on
Field Day. While
films from major directors like Jean-Luc Godard, Robert Bresson and Japan's Yasujiro Ozu have never been nominated, most of the nominees—and more than a few winners— have faded out
in
movie memory.
Polley can also
take some solace in her own award for Best Canadian Film (and the $100,000
prize that went with it), while U.S. audiences can now see her extraordinary narrative recounted on DVD. In our era of one-sided, deceptively manipulated
“docu-fictions,” Polley lyrically reconstructs (and deconstructs) an extremely
personal story, generously bringing in a kaleidoscope of disparate, sometimes
contradictory viewpoints.
In a near oedipal
odyssey, Polley documents her search to uncover a maternal secret that lay
hidden in her family's closet for 28 years. The main character in the mystery is
Polley’s mother Diane, a onetime Toronto casting director and actress. While
not literally present to tell her own story, Polley mere nostalgically appears in a series of glowing home movies (some actually recreated). At the
other end of the Freudian spectrum is Polley’s dad Michael, a British-born
actor who settled in Toronto in the 1950s to marry and raise a family.
A la Charles
Foster Kane, the life of Diane Polley is reconstructed, in jigsaw-puzzle
fashion, by those who knew her best as well as by those only on the family’s
borders. Vivacious and rebellious, Diane was a woman before her time,
unhappy with the rigid roles of middle-class marriage and family, yet also, by
most accounts, a loving if mercurial wife and mother.
A clever
raconteur, Polley reveals key facts of her chronicle in measured doses, never
letting us know too much of this remarkable, often touching saga at once. A 3-D
puzzle of sorts (without those silly glasses), the film is skillfully glued
together with a complex array of stylistic devices, from competing voice-overs
(one from a prepared script read by Michael Polley) and disjunctive dubbed
dialogue to standard talking-heads interviews, punctuated with lingering
close-ups that speak volumes.
Polley is also
smart enough to realize that “truth” is often, um, relative, particularly when
people have something to gain or hide—Rashomon
told us that. But in this meta-home movie that continually examines its own
assumptions (sometimes to a fault), Polley unveils not simply the small story of
one woman’s family secret, but by extension poignantly leads us to bigger, roomier
stories about marriage, motherhood, love and life itself.
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2/4/14
