Embracing her truth
Autobiographical story hailed as first #MeToo film gets standing ovation
PARK CITY, UTAH— Filmmaker Jennifer Fox got an “A” for a confessional essay she wrote as a 13-year-old for her English class 45 years ago.
Without realizing it at the time, she also got a window into her own sexual abuse at the hands of two athletic coaches she’d loved and trusted.
It took decades for the truth to fully come out, culminating with an explosive autobiographical dramatic film, The
Tale, which received a standing ovation following its world premiere Saturday at the Sundance Film Festival.
It’s being hailed as the first film of the #MeToo movement, although it was made before that ongoing rousting of sexual abusers and harassers began last fall. The movie includes scenes of adult and child sex, made using an adult actor doubling for the child, that stunned the audience here.
Set in both 2008 and 1973, and frequently intersecting people and events from both years, The Tale stars Laura Dern as Jennifer and Canada’s Isabelle Nélisse as Jennie, the older and younger versions of writer/director Fox.
Jennifer, a globe-trotting documentarian and film instructor living in New York with her fiancé, Martin (rapper Common), receives a telephone call from her concerned mother (Ellen Burstyn) about a school essay from 1973 that mom discovered while cleaning the family home.
The essay is an account by an unnamed 13-year-old girl of the intense relationship she had the previous summer of “two very special people whom I’ve come to love dearly”: her running coach Bill (Jason Ritter) and her horseback riding instructor Mrs. G (Elizabeth Debicki). The essay was supposed to be fictional — and Jennie’s English teacher apparently took it as such — but mom realizes that Jennie is describing herself and a real situation of sexual abuse.
The adult Jennifer doesn’t remember it that way, but admits her memory of 1973 is hazy. At her mother’s urging, she begins to investigate and interrogate her personal past, which leads to the shocking discovery of a conspiracy by Bill and Mrs. G to lure, seduce and sexually abuse young girls.
The story unfolds bit by bit, and challenges the viewer to keep up with it as events and characters collide with each other, often breaking the dramatic “fourth wall” as adult Jennifer and young Jennifer argue with each other about what really happened. Watching them makes for unsettling but spellbinding viewing.
The Tale was a harrowing and “gruelling” experience both to live and to put on film, Fox told her Eccles Theatre audience, which gave her a standing ovation. She’s a Sundance veteran, having won the festival’s Grand Jury Prize for Documentary in 1988 for her life-duringwartime doc Beirut: The Last Home Movie.
The Tale is her first dramatic feature, and it’s about “trying to get the past right,” she said. It took her decades to admit to herself what happened to her in 1973, because she had submerged and altered the details in her mind to protect herself. It was while making the TV miniseries Flying in 2006, which involved talking to women around the world about their sexual experiences both good and bad, that she realized she had to embrace her own truth.
“It just blew my cover, because this event that I’d always called a ‘rela- tionship,’ all of a sudden wasn’t personal, wasn’t individual, but was actually universal,” Fox said.
“And it was then I thought, OK, it’s time to make this film, it’s time to tell this story. Eventually, I realized it was about memory and how I constructed the story in order to survive.” At her side onstage were cast members of The Tale, with the exception of Laura Dern, who has the flu and was unable to travel to Sundance.
The actors praised Fox for her bravery and honestly, with 85-yearold Ellen Burstyn going a step further and revealing another impetus for Fox’s film: the infamous Access Hollywood tape by U.S. President Donald Trump, recorded when he was a reality TV star and released during the 2016 presidential campaign, in which he boasts of sexually assaulting women.
“Donald Trump, that disgusting tape that he made that we all heard. That was the final straw that broke this woman’s back,” Burstyn said.
More films about youth and rough truth: There are multiple films at Sundance 2018 about young people coming to grips with difficult realities.
Two other strong ones premiered over this past weekend: comedian Bo Burnham’s Eighth Grade and actor Paul Dano’s Wildlife, both of them feature film directorial debuts.
Eighth Grade is a comedy about the exquisite awkwardness of 13year-old Kayla, played by Elsie Fisher, who feigns confidence and offers life advice to the masses via homemade YouTube videos. Fisher is great, and the film would make a fine double bill with Greta Gerwig’s Oscar-tipped Lady Bird.
Wildlife is a bleak but artful coming-of-age drama, set in 1960 Montana, about 14-year old Joe, played by Ed Oxenbould. He’s caught in the middle of the marital meltdown of his parents, played by Carey Mulligan and Jake Gyllenhaal, and forced to become an adult too soon. Oxenbould is a knockout in a role that is as much about as reacting as acting.
Expect to hear more about The Tale, Eighth Grade and Wildlife in the weeks and months ahead.