G flatter her by telling her that she’s special, that they think of her as an equal, that they think they can trust her with secrets. It’s sickening.īill baits her with lines like, “You’re not afraid of life, right, Jenny? You’re not afraid of living?” He and Mrs. She rages at the word “victim,” an indictment of the inherent lack of sensitivity in imposing a victim narrative on anyone who comes forward with a traumatizing story.Įventually she pieces together an explicit, clear-eyed recollection of the relationship with Bill, and we watch it play out on screen. “It’s complicated,” she instinctively retorts. “You were raped,” she’s told multiple times. Or even to answer if anything happened to her. She starts to visit people she hadn’t seen in decades, attempting to get a more detailed picture of that time that the years have blurred-part of her desperate search for a reason this happened to her. Nearly every line of dialogue hits you like a cannonball, its relevance to the stories and confessions that have been chronicled in the #MeToo movement these last months uncanny. “Can’t I just sit with my own memories?” she pleads, preferring to remember the relationship fondly instead relitigate it as assault. “This is why I didn’t tell you,” Jennifer says, dismissing her mother’s concerns. Suspicions she had 35 years before were true: these adults had taken advantage of her daughter. G (Elizabeth Debicki.) Her mother is beside herself. When we meet Dern’s Jennifer, her mother (Burstyn) is leaving her a litany of emotionally charged voicemails, having just discovered an essay Jennifer wrote when she was 13 titled “The Tale,” which discussed the loving relationship she had with two adults: Bill (Jason Ritter) and Mrs. Throughout the film, Fox plays with form, storytelling structure, and the truth in jarring ways here-at one point Laura Dern, who plays Jennifer as an adult, is actually in conversation with Isabelle Nelisse, who plays her at age 13-to illustrate the myriad ways in which a person needs to communicate, with others and themselves, past and present, to reckon fully with an event like this. How she feels about it now is almost an afterthought, until, at a major climax, it isn’t. It’s her struggle through frustrating notes of denial, rationalization, misremembrance, and anger as she tries to piece together what really happened to her-not what her memory of it was-and why. It’s an adult woman’s journey to the horrifying realization that her innocence was preyed on that she was abused in a way that impacted the rest of her life. It’s sickening.”īut The Tale isn’t a linear narrative about a child who was raped. “Eventually she pieces together an explicit, clear-eyed recollection of the relationship with Bill, and we watch it play out on screen. Immediately following the post-screening Q&A, in which stars Ellen Burstyn and Jason Ritter broke down in tears talking about the movie, it became clear that this is the film everyone at Sundance will be talking about. When Bill starts to coax Jennifer into a sexual relationship, she convinces herself that they’re in love. Thirteen-year-old Jennifer is intoxicated by the regal, beautiful Mrs. G” (names were changed from Fox’s own life) was her equestrian trainer, and “Bill” was her running coach. The Tale is a memoir film in which writer-director Jennifer Fox confronts the sexual abuse she suffered when she was a 13-year-old girl, having spent the next three-and-a-half decades of her life convincing herself that she was engaged in a “special” relationship with a 40-year-old man, facilitated by a woman she trusted.īoth were people in her life she loved: “Mrs.
But its Sundance Film Festival premiere Saturday afternoon-the first of this year’s festival to receive a standing ovation that we witnessed-is so timely it could very well have been called: #MeToo, The Movie. In many respects, The Tale has been in the making for the last 35 years.