SARAH POLLEY’S "STORIES WE TELL," MEMORY AND REALITY: A MOVIE REVIEW

Sarah Polley’s new movie, Stories We Tell, is excellent in revealing character after character from her childhood as she seeks to know her mother more completely. The film entertains while raising big questions about our ability to apprehend reality through memory.

 

It’s a subject that invites didacticism and pretentiousness, but Polley has found a way to show rather than tell, to enact important, interesting experiences rather than summarizing or lecturing about them, even when her overall purpose is as philosophical—as epistemological—as it is personal.  

Her strategy involves a question of authorial honesty: do the ends justify the means? But I can’t delve into that without spoiling the movie experience for others. I’ll just say this: your take on the movie won’t be complete unless you’ve paid careful attention to the closing credits.

A film about the nature of memory and reality might sound too heavy for a summer’s evening, but Polley’s characters and plot keep moving right along in this 1960s home movie camera’s characterization of Sarah Polley’s mother, Diane, and some significant people in her life. That movement is both entertaining and intellectually engaging, as people and events are alternately revealed and concealed.  

I think most viewers will be pulled into the Polley story and care about some or all of these people—the lively, charismatic, lovable Diane and, more importantly, two generations of her inner circle as they react to Diane.

The memories and versions of Diane are slightly or dramatically different from each other. It’s like that parlor game called Telephone, or Truth, where the story that was whispered by Benny to Betty becomes altered significantly as it’s passed on in whispers to and from a half dozen or so other friends. In Polley’s movie, the stakes are higher; the story is much more than a parlor game. But who has it right?

The characters are articulate, interesting Canadians who have done interesting things—especially in the world of theater. And the stage, of course, presents its own questions about reality. Why might we weep for King Lear but not the old crank across the street? 

If Lear’s daughter Goneril and his loyal servant Kent gave their separate, personal accounts of what has happened to the father and king, we might think we were hearing about two different people. Of course, honesty in the telling would be an issue, too.

The evil Goneril and the impossibly loyal Kent would also be narrating what they need to believe. On top of being genuinely mistaken about the actual Lear, they might knowingly deceive their audience here and there in order to win them over. By the end of the story, we might throw up our hands and wonder if we can know the old guy even existed.

Can a movie that moves and sounds as natural and realistic as Stories We Tell raise legitimate epistemological questions? Can it stir us to wondering (again, I hope) how we can or cannot know what we think we know? Yes, I think so. For pleasure and for more careful thinking about the past, see this film. Then wonder, till the cows come home, whether the popcorn was real. Either way, it’s a richer two hours than anything else you’d have done.

The Messenger, Part Two

On Dec. 18, I reviewed The Messenger, a movie about two soldiers whose assignment is notifying the next of kin that the U.S. soldier in their family has been killed.

In response, Jeff M, a thoughtful and regular visitor, writes: “My God, who the hell would want to watch this film? No offense, Banjo, but some things...I don't know. It's right up there with Sophie’s Choice or Boys Don't Cry.”

Jeff, I know what you mean, but where does one draw that line concerning serious art? At Dostoevsky? I completely understand a reluctance to seek out grim stuff, to pay admission to be depressed as well as enlightened. I've never put myself through Clockwork Orange along with a number of other books and movies, especially when there are more innards and sliced flesh on film than in medical schools.

Still, when I make those choices, I know I’m sacrificing something—maybe the new information and perspectives offered in The Messenger, maybe the elevation of human suffering to the status of tragedy. An audio recording of King Lear can make me shiver, but it’s a price I'm willing to pay once in awhile for witnessing the eloquent arrogance of social rank and senility and fatherhood as they are struck down into eloquent humility.

I remember Sophie's Choice as magnificent, if difficult—ditto the more recent The Road and Hurt Locker, and any number of other high quality but grim movies. Like you, however, I’ve consciously chosen to skip some. Don’t you think it’s got to be a personal choice?

The people who make me crazy are those who seem to get off on war while confining their reading and movies to Patriotism Made Simple by Moe Rawn and the Simpleton Brothers. Those people should be forced to see every minute of every convincing war movie—twice. Ditto for bigots and well-made movies about racism or sexism. Or am I just refusing to accept that bricks can’t think?

Jeff, I'm pretty sure that's not you signing up for Jingoism 101, so by all means skip this movie if you want to, need to. But I’m not sorry I saw and praised The Messenger; I think it added important fuel to my skepticism about American wars popping up like zits, here, there, and everywhere.

As we’ve heard so often since our war in Vietnam, the surviving veterans of most wars—and their loved ones—are wounded in myriad ways, from which the rest of us are shielded. Maybe the least I can do is put myself through two hours of forced enlightenment about an aspect of military life I've probably never considered. I don't have to endure such things every time, but sometimes, especially if someone I trust tells me how and why the book or movie is well-made.

So, as long as viewers have some of sense of what they’re getting into, I recommend, again, The Messenger as good film making.

More importantly, I repeat what I said in the December 18 review: most of Congress should see it—right after they volunteer their children or themselves or their spouses to be put in harm's way in one of our foreign ventures.

This should be a rule: if you vote for war, you go to war—or send your young offspring because they are more able warrior surrogates. I suppose that’s Utopian, though I’m not entirely sure why.

You might have heard something similar from Michael Moore in Fahrenheit 9/11 (2004), but I promise I had the idea decades before seeing that good film. And of course, when Michael Moore is your ally, your argument is probably more than halfway down the tubes in mainstream America—not because it’s unsound but because it fails the Simpleton’s Red, White, and Blue test, which is entirely multiple choice. Experiences like The Messenger are essay tests, and they’ll be graded hard.

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New Criticism, Part 2: The Intentional Fallacy

Left: My Grandmother?

The Singer and the Song

So you say you love Faulkner? Me too (or at least I went through a mild Faulkner phase). Therefore, you want to know what he intended by blah blah about blah blah in this or that work? Who was the real Benjy, and was he in fact a savant?

In a PBS interview with Faulkner’s daughter a couple decades ago, when she was middle aged, she talked about being a young girl and trying to stop one of her father's drinking binges—she’d learned to recognize the beginnings.
“Pappie,” she said, “please don’t. Please stop.”
His reply? “Nobody remembers Shakespeare’s children.”

Although it’s not relevant, I want to add that Faulkner's daughter, all those years later, was dignified and restrained in narrating this tale. Dignity and restraint are valuable weapons.

The point is, artists and writers full of psychopathologies have produced stunning works—Van Gogh, Plath, Sexton, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Nietzsche—the list seems endless. In fact, we commonly assume—don’t we?—that great artists have led unusually troubled, often mean lives, unless we hear otherwise. Presumed guilty (i.e., neurotic) until proven innocent. Somehow that mollifies and elevates our own troubles and meanness, I suspect; we are of a kind with Faulkner, or something like that. Never mind that he'd probably prefer we be of a kind with his characters.

Further irony: don’t we assume that literature offers wisdom, whatever else it might do? Yet we expect this wisdom to come from our looniest fellow travelers. The looniness produces the wisdom. Why else Lear's fool? And from there, it's only inches to: "I am loony; therefore, I am wise."

Of course some of that might be true. The point is, however, in being a good reader, it is wasteful to speculate much about the author’s life or his intentions, titillating as that can be, because authors are not completely aware of the correlation between their intentions and the object they’ve in fact created.

The work is on the page; read it. The writer is dead or dying or too flawed to believe, or simply unaware of precisely what he’s wrought. So what he says about his work is of limited value. Think of his commentary as literary fortune cookies, party favors, mints on the pillow. Do not think of his remarks as the entrée; that’s pointless idol worship. That's Hollywood. That's fawning from the mosh pit. Instead, read the damned poem. Over and over. Out loud. Can you chant it? Why not? Wallow in it. If it's too shallow for a long-wallow, there's your answer about how good the poem is, at least for you; and in arriving at that evaluation, you've probably come to understand it fairly well.

Was that too impressionistic? How about this hypothetical: a writer intends to compose a merely literal chronology of his grandmother’s life, but does it so well that he ends up with a brilliant novel about man’s inhumanity to man. Why should we deny his achievement simply because it was not his intent to produce so grand an object?

Of course the evaluation game usually goes the other direction, with the author trying for canonical greatness, but achieving only a superficial sketch of his grandmother’s life. In either case, his intent is irrelevant. The work product "is what it is," as we say these days; it may or may not be what its creator intended it to be. It sits there trying to come alive on its own terms, begging us to participate in it, not its creator's daydreams or the facts of his life.

More coming? You betcha. (I speak Alaskan).

Random: Shakespeare, Tragedy, Modernism

Left: King Lear or Polonius?

Even with The Bard, sometimes we just have to love the boy in spite of himself. A couple of years ago, in the final scenes of an excellent production of King Lear, the play came to its predictable conclusion of dying humans flopping around the stage like hooked fish flailing on a pier. It might have been worse in Hamlet, sometime later, again in an otherwise excellent production.

This business of death as group seizure, or Shakespeare's intimation of the mosh pit four centuries later, would be absurd under any circumstances. Add to it the sound of bodies thumping against the wooden stage floor and the eloquent dying declarations (as our TV cop and lawyer shows might say, “excited utterances”), and it is all simply comic. Shakespearean tragedies must give directors fits.

All that flopping and thumping ruin my willing suspension of disbelief, along with any empathy or glee I’d developed toward the dying. It makes me long for Gary Cooper in a dusty ten-gallon hat, mumbling “Yes, Ma’am, this here eight-inch hole in my gizzard, it hurts a might.” Or Yogi Berra’s “Pain don’t hurt.”

I know, I know, you don’t go to a Shakespearean tragedy if you want Amy Hempel or Raymond Carver minimalism. But classic theater, along with the excesses of opera, might instruct us on why we have come to value understatement and restraint the way we do. Maybe the Renaissance showed us the idealized human, what we hope we can be at our very best, but an occasional or permanent attempt to see what we really are cannot be an entirely bad development.

ABOUT BOOKS

Above: Rocky the Reader

Here are the numbers of Blogspot bloggers, including me, who include these works or authors as their favorites.

The Great Gatsby 358,000
King Lear 7,700
Raymond Carver’s stories 5,700
Tobias Wolff’s stories 265 (or does that include his book-length work as well?)
Alice Munro’s stories 4

These numbers have a kind of logic, except for one item: why so few for Munro? At least in Canada, she’s become well-known and highly awarded in the last decade or two.

I suspect the problem is that her stories aren’t page-turners in the usual sense of the word. But if you want multidimensional, thoroughly developed characters, who find themselves in intriguing, troubling, believable situations in remote small towns or country settings, she is your writer.

My favorite Munro stories tend to be set somewhere in the past (1950s backward to the nineteenth century) in the villages or wilderness of Ontario. Munro makes me care deeply about people and places that seem to have absolutely nothing to do with me. The only exceptions for me are occasional tilts toward soap opera in a few of the stories with modern settings.

If you’ll allow yourself to slow down to Munro’s dignified, but never turgid style, you’ll learn about distant places and their humans; I have found page-by-page satisfactions and surprises (including beauties of phrasing and leaps in plot or characterization).

Try “Meneseteung,” “Carried Away,” “Wilderness Station” and “Vandals”—all four of which are placed toward the end of her Selected Stories 1996).

I’d also be interested in your responses to the stories of Aimee Bender and two poets I’m getting know somewhat, though they seem to inhabit different universes: Bob Hicok and Karen Volkman.

I almost added to my favorites Edward P. Jones’s magnificent The Known World, but I’ve only read it once, and, in case there's a quiz, I decided to include only works I’ve known really well at one time or another.