“In The Tale, an early critical favorite at this year’s Sundance Film Festival and a drama of uncommonly troubling power, Laura Dern plays Jennifer Fox, a documentary filmmaker trying to remember an experience that befell her at the age of thirteen, when she was preyed upon sexually by an older man,” begins Justin Chang in the Los Angeles Times. “The movie was written and directed by the real-life documentary filmmaker Jennifer Fox, who noted during the post-screening Q&A that, apart from the fact that she and Dern look nothing alike, the story is ‘pure memoir.’ . . . With grueling intimacy, remarkable courage and a nervily intricate approach to psychology and narrative, Fox shuffles her painful memories like puzzle pieces and invites us to sift through them alongside her. She has made not only an unsparingly confrontational look at the trauma of abuse, but also an extended rumination on the unreliable nature of memory—the peculiar alchemy by which storytelling becomes a means of survival.”
This is “a landmark cine-memoir that’s as powerful and profoundly upsetting as any film since The Act of Killing,” declares IndieWire’s David Ehrlich, “a staggering and radical work of self-analysis that’s also a remarkably lucid piece of autobiography.” And it’s “undeniably primed for the #MeToo movement, but it’s also so much bigger than that. While the film triple underlines the vile nature of these crimes and the vital importance of our growing solidarity against them, to fully conflate Fox’s achievement with a political movement (even such a necessary one) could only diminish the personal scope of its power.”
“Young Jenny, played sensitively by Isabelle Nélisse, believes she’s in a relationship with her coach, the boyishly handsome Bill (Jason Ritter, admirably committed to a punishing role) and that she will someday, somehow, join Bill and her riding instructor, Mrs. G (Elizabeth Debicki, coy and slippery), in a kind of New Age-y version of romantic union,” explains Vanity Fair’s Richard Lawson. “Bill and Mrs. G have a manipulative, faux-enlightened philosophy that they use to lure Jenny in, and it’s the movie’s delicate, insisting work to pick all that apart—and, finally, to cast it aside—to get to the heart of what happened.”
“Straight-to-camera speeches, games of temporal disjunction, and moments when the narrator/protagonist interacts directly with her younger self and people still in the past work as edgy devices that help express the fragility of memory,” writes Leslie Felperin in the Hollywood Reporter. “Social media was soon abuzz with praise after the film's premiere, with many rightly lauding the bravery of Fox's work of creative nonfiction.”
“Fox isn’t posing as her own therapist so much as a new kind of private investigator, drawing from her own documentary research skills to uncover this half-forgotten chapter of her own past,” suggests Variety’s Peter Debruge.
“The Tale rattled me in ways I didn’t know I still could be rattled,” writes Jordan Hoffman for the Guardian. “I want more people to see The Tale because it’s such an innovative, honest and important film. It is a landmark, and Laura Dern is absolutely extraordinary. But I know for certain I’ll never watch it again.”
“This is certainly not a film that everyone will be able to take, but it’s rare to see a film that’s this fearlessly confrontational and emotionally complex,” adds Brian Tallerico at RogerEbert.com.
Fox’s “willingness to tell her own story in such graphic detail is a startlingly brave act,” agrees Gregory Ellwood at the Playlist.
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