‘The Tale’ is a chilling, timely Me Too drama
PARK CITY, Utah – The same day the Women’s March united hundreds of thousands of people across the country, an audience at Sundance Film Festival rallied behind sexual abuse survivor Jennifer Fox and her urgent new movie The Tale.
The true-life drama, which sold to HBO Films after its premiere, is Fox’s heartbreaking account of how she was repeatedly raped by her running coach, “Bill” (Jason Ritter), when she was just 13. The story jumps back and forth between Jennifer as an introverted teenager (Isabelle Nélisse) and a successful adult (Laura Dern), who managed to suppress her painful memories as a means of survival and find contentment in her career and fiancé (Common).
But when Jennifer’s mother (Ellen Burstyn) finds her decades-old short story about the abuse and confronts her daughter, Jennifer is forced to reconcile with her childhood trauma and those that may have turned the other cheek — most notably, her horseback-riding instructor and Bill’s lover “Mrs. G” (Elizabeth Debicki), whose uninhibited nature and welcoming home was a respite from Jennifer’s austere family life.
Fox was visibly emotional as she received a standing ovation during a postscreening Q&A, where she was joined by
The Tale’s main cast (excluding Dern, who had a cold). She was inspired to share her experience onscreen while making the 2006 docuseries Flying: Confessions of a Free Woman.
“I was talking to women around the world and started to hear my story (of sexual abuse),” Fox said. “It didn’t matter the class, it didn’t matter the color, it didn’t matter the nationality — anecdotally, it was like one in two women had a story. It blew my cover, because this event that I had called a ‘relationship’ all of a sudden wasn’t personal, wasn’t individual, but was actually universal.” The most chilling moments in The
Tale are the scenes between Bill and young Jennifer, whom he showers with compliments and affection before molesting and raping her. Strict measures were in place for depicting physical contact between the two characters: Nélisse’s facial reactions were filmed days apart from the scenes with Ritter, who shot with an adult body double.
“No one wanted to create more trau- ma on the set, and having the body double there for me personally helped me to lean into it more,” said Ritter, who started crying mid-response. “It was really complicated, and when it was a grown woman there, it was easier for me to try to do some of those scenes.”
Burstyn similarly choked up moments later when she was asked what the project meant to her.
“The exploitation of innocence is a deep, criminal crime. It’s time now — right now — in this moment in our history to change it,” Burstyn said, before turning her attention to the president and the Me Too movement, which has sparked a national conversation about sexual misconduct across industries.
“I want to thank Donald Trump for that disgusting (‘Grab ‘em by the [expletive]’) tape that he made, that we all heard,” she said. “That was the final straw. ... We can now, at last, deal with this problem that has gone on for centuries all over the world. And this film is giving voice to it.”