Settling on the deceptively generic title The Tale for Jennifer Fox’s fascinating HBO film is just one of the project’s sly and innovative touches. Not only does it link to subtexts, the word itself suggests at least a reverberation of fiction making — i.e., the stuff of tales, tall, scary and otherwise. Yet reality reinterpreted is the central operating mode in this chilling, truth-fueled saga. Significantly, the first words we hear are in the filmmaker/lead character’s voice: “The story you’re about to see is true … as far as I know.”
The tale the protagonist — also named Jennifer Fox (Laura Dern, in a stunning, controlled, Emmy-worthy turn) — is talking about concerns the writer/director’s own experience as a 13-year-old, seduced and abused by an older man in a position of power and influence. Of secondary but critical importance is the slow unraveling of that experience within an adult’s tangled web of memories and self-deceptions surrounding what she had retroactively regarded as a “romance.” Fox the protagonist’s awakening to the truth of things begins when her mother (Ellen Burstyn) is shocked upon discovering the details of the “relationship” in one of her daughter’s adolescent essays. The Tale syncs up with the #MeToo moment in society and culture while also plumbing other psychological depths.
In the film, Fox gives her abuser a pseudonym and so protects the guilty party; she also changes him from an eminent writer who is still alive to a running coach (Jason Ritter and later, John Heard), whose deviance is abetted by the charismatic “Mrs. G” (Frances Conroy). But Fox faces the truth in other ways, including giving her central character her name and career, a mid-life documentary filmmaker, like the writer/director behind this film.