Jennifer Fox’s drama “The Tale” (which came out on HBO last Saturday) is a story in the vein of the #MeToo movement that is set nearly a decade before it became the focus of a global cultural reckoning. It’s the story of a forty-eight-year-old documentary filmmaker named Jennifer Fox (Laura Dern), who reconsiders a sexual relationship that she had at the age of thirteen, in 1973, with a middle-aged man, which she only now recognizes as abusive. The year of the movie’s dramatic present tense is never stated, but it’s obviously thirty-five years after 1973: 2008. The movie is a #MeToo story that dramatizes the vital importance of that movement and the shift in mores that it both embodies and advances. It’s a story of terrifying loneliness, of a life of solitary confinement in the cell of memory, and of the vulnerability that even apparently strong and confident women have endured through the insidiously erected and enforced barriers of that isolation—an isolation that is being dissolved now, bit by bit, through courageous and heroic efforts such as “The Tale” itself.
“The Tale” is, as an opening title card says, “based on filmmaker Jennifer Fox’s personal experience,” and it features a voice-over by Dern as Fox, saying, “The story you are about to see is true—as far as I know.” (We’ll call the character Jennifer and the real-life filmmaker Fox.) Jennifer, an experienced documentary filmmaker and professor, returns from a film shoot in India to frantic phone messages from her mother, Nettie (Ellen Burstyn), who, while going through papers at home, found a story that Jennifer wrote at the age of thirteen and presented, in school, as a work of fiction. It’s called “The Tale” and is about what Jennifer (called, at the time, Jenny) considered a “beautiful” experience. That experience was a sexual relationship with a forty-ish man named Bill Allens (Jason Ritter), whose lover and close companion was her riding instructor, Jane Gramercy (Elizabeth Debicki). (Both characters' names are fictitious.)
The relationship that Jenny described in “The Tale” really happened, but up to this point in her life Jennifer, to the extent that she has ever recalled the events, has thought of them as positive, and never considered herself to be the victim of a rapist and his accomplice, or any kind of victim at all. But now, presented with the story again, she decides to seek the truth about the relationship by seeking out the people who were involved or had knowledge of it at the time—Bill, Jane, and other former students of theirs whom she knew as a child. In the process, Jennifer begins to remember in detail her experiences with Bill and Jane as a child, and to confront, for the first time, their horror, or, more accurately, their double horror—both the specifics of actions from when she was a child and her long-suppressed emotional responses to them at the time.
“The Tale” (the movie) is a kind of detective story, with Jennifer’s newly awakened memories dramatized onscreen as flashbacks, and it’s here that Fox comes up with a cinematic coup. In her first batch of reminiscences, Jennifer recalls her thirteen-year-old self as a tall, confident, mature young woman (played by Jessica Sarah Flaum). But when a former student (Jodi Long) says that Jenny was shorter and shyer than the other girls, Jennifer visits her mother and glances through family photos, discovering just how childlike she seemed. From that point on, Jenny appears younger and slighter in the flashbacks (and is played by Isabelle Nélisse). When, eventually, Jennifer’s memories (which mainly advance chronologically) get to the night when Bill coaxes her into sex, the scene is horrifying—it’s the rape of a child who, as Jennifer now realizes, is unable to say no to an adult. Jennifer now realizes that her close relationships with Jane and Bill were merely grooming for her sexual relationship with Bill, which she now recognizes as abusive. Though she herself doesn’t call it rape, as her fiancé, Martin (played by Common), does, she is appalled to recognize that she was treated monstrously by them.
The immediate, physical horrors of Bill’s abuse (simulated in the film with a body double, as a title card states) are enabled by a web of horrors surrounding them, from the crimes of Jane’s complicity in grooming Jenny emotionally to her parents’ well-meaning but bewildered sense of denial. That denial factors into the action in subtle but anguished illuminations. Nettie admits that she knew, at the time, that something was wrong in Jenny’s relations with Bill but was dissuaded by her husband and Jenny’s father, Aaron (Matthew Rauch), from saying anything—not because he approved of any such relations but because he didn’t want to instill his children with a fear of life. Jenny’s grandmother (as Jennifer now recalls) even saw Bill kiss her on the lips and, in shock and outrage, vowed to tell Jenny’s parents—but never did so. What’s more, Jenny’s teacher, who seemed disturbed by the confidences that Jenny divulged in her schoolwork, nonetheless very hastily accepted Jenny’s claim that the story was fiction.
There are limits to Fox’s methods of cinematic self-investigation. “The Tale” is a documentary film in the literal sense—it’s centered on the actual document that the young Jenny wrote—yet the specifics of that document, whether the text that she wrote or the physical object itself figure only scantly and briefly in the film. The short dramatic scenes that are cut to fit the movie’s informational purposes flatten out the character of Jennifer and render her largely the subject of the experiences recalled in flashback; some of the present-day scenes resemble documentary reënactments, approximations of an underlying framework of events. For all its exploration of personal experiences, “The Tale” is an oddly impersonal personal movie—yet its dramatic thinness is, in its own way, revelatory. Fox insightfully and bravely keeps one eye, while filming, away from herself and her own experience and looks, so to speak, outside the frame, to the vast context in which the abuse that she endured took place. That context is more than the personal one of Jenny’s unhappiness with her family life, or her yearning for a great romantic adventure, or even the psychology of her repressed or distorted memories: it’s the very historical shift, from the time that Jenny was thirteen, in 1973, to the present tense of the action, in 2008, and to now, in 2018.
There’s a phrase that turns up on several occasions in the film, that the mores at the time of Jenny’s abuse were different because it was “the seventies.” “The Tale” powerfully dramatizes the effect of culture and politics on the most intimate extremes of a person’s life—and how particularly distorting and damaging this collective power has been for women, because women have not by and large been the ones making the rules to which they have been subjected. “The Tale” dramatizes young Jenny’s individual gaslighting by Bill and Jane; but it also dramatizes the collective gaslighting of women by such cultural forces as the ones that held sway in 1973—and it dramatizes the devastating long-term effect of that vast deception. The ultimate drama of “The Tale”—highlighted by sequences showing the forty-eight-year-old Jennifer holding imaginary discussions with the participants in the 1973 events, and with her own younger self—is the shattering of Jennifer’s sense of self. She comes to discover not only that a formative relationship that she considered beautiful was actually abuse and rape; she discovers that she has built her identity on those lies, the personal ones fed to her by Bill and Jane and the collective ones that sheltered them then and have sheltered other abusers since.
Fox’s movie renders the reconsideration of the personal past inseparable from reconsiderations of the historical past—and so, of cultural objects from the past that exert enduring power today. It holds up to sharp scrutiny the romantic nostalgia for eras believed to be freer or less inhibited and raises the question of whose ostensible freedoms were being granted and celebrated, whose freedoms were overlooked and dismissed. “The Tale” suggests a vast personal self-reconciliation and self-reconstruction that the character of Jennifer will undertake. But it builds that idea into a wider idea, of another collective reconstruction; it looks not just backward but ahead, from 2008 to today—and to change that’s as critical for the inner lives of individuals as it is for society at large.
Sourse: newyorker.com
