PARK CITY – Jennifer Fox is the director of “The Tale,” a new drama which had its world premiere Saturday at the 2018 Sundance Film Festival. The lead character played exquisitely by Laura Dern is also named Jennifer Fox. She’s a documentary filmmaker just like Fox who won the Grand Jury Prize at this same festival in the Documentary category in 1988. Fox knows firsthand the events that occur to Dern’s character in her feature narrative debut because they happened to her. And beyond its creative success and failures, her willingness to tell her own story in such graphic detail is a startlingly brave act.
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The film begins about 10 years ago when 48-year-old Jennifer (Dern) gets a call from her mother (Ellen Burstyn) regarding a short story she found while cleaning, that her daughter had written when she was just 13. It told the story of an unnamed girl who fell in love with a man and a woman and in her mother’s eyes it clearly was a metaphor for something that had happened to her daughter the previous summer. Jennifer is startled when she re-reads the story as it starts to bring back a flood of buried memories. Recollections of spending that summer riding her horse at a nearby farm owned by Mrs. G (Elizabeth Debicki, fantastic) and how she’d developed a friendship with Mrs. G’s neighbor, Bill (Jason Ritter, gutsy), a famed track coach. But it was more than just a friendship and athletic guidance. Bill coerced her into believing it was a “secret relationship” that found the younger Jennifer, referred to as Jennie (Isabelle Nélisse, a talent), lying to her parents so she can spend multiple weekends alone with him at his home. And, fair warning, along with Jennifer we revisit how he manipulated her into having sexual relations with him in disturbing detail.
Jennifer becomes obsessed with uncovering who knew what transpired, and reaches out to a number of other girls who rode on the farm, as well as a now much older Mrs. G (Frances Conroy, deceptively good) to find out anything she can. The more she investigates, the more she encounters a seemingly endless list of unanswered questions. That frustration not only begins to seep into her position as a filmmaking instructor at a local college, but finds her pushing away her current boyfriend Martin (Common, solid), who is only interested in helping her anyway he can. You can see Jennifer’s inevitable confrontation with Bill (John Heard, pitch perfect) coming very early on but Fox the filmmaker isn’t going to let herself off that easily.
A good chunk of Fox’s screenplay takes place during that summer and she has some unique transitions between both time periods. What is truly unexpected, however, is how she breaks the fourth wall by having Jennifer (again, Dern) ask questions of Mrs. G (Debicki) and herself, Jennie (Nélisse). She wisely only has Dern appear in the same frame with Nélisse twice with most of Jennifer’s questions being a voiceover. Almost as if Jennifer were investigating her own life for a documentary. It’s justifiably an awkward shift at the beginning of the film, but Debicki in particular makes it less jarring as the movie goes on and it pays off spectacularly at the end.
But, again, Fox isn’t interested in presenting “The Tale” as a cut and dry case. She challenges the viewer to see Jennie’s side of it. To contemplate why she didn’t think she’d been wronged even if she clearly had. And to justify (or not) how this experience affected her entire life from sexual promiscuity to her disinterest in family and children. This will no doubt make many uncomfortable, but as Fox noted before the screening she knows the film will spark discussion and she’ll be discussing it for months (and possibly years) to come.
Inevitably for a first time narrative filmmaker, Fox also has some bumps along the way, as there are a few moments that are simply staged a little too conventionally. Especially considering her aforementioned bold choice in breaking the fourth wall. Luckily, Fox has Dern to carry those moments through. At one point Dern allows her character to let it all out. She lets her find a release from the burden of her memories knowing they will never go away. And it just hits you like a hammer. Fox could have asked for nothing less. [B+]
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