Laura Dern in HBO’s The Tale: A magisterial, haunting performance

Indeed, that claim is not far off the mark, as the career of this Los Angeles native is peppered with forceful yet disciplined performances. Born to actor parents, Bruce Dern and Diane Ladd, she rose to fame in 1980s with films like Peter Bogdanovich’s Mask and David Lynch’s Blue Velvet.

It was Steven Spielberg’s Jurassic Park that made her a globally known name. She will reprise the role of Dr Ellie Sattler in the upcoming Jurassic World: Dominion. Needless to say, in her long and varied career, it is hard to single out any one performance of hers as the best, but in my opinion it is a relatively lesser known project called The Tale.

An HBO film released in 2018, this Jennifer Fox film was both important and deeply disturbing. Fox, usually a documentarian, took a departure to write and direct this semi-autobiographical project based on her own experiences of sexual abuse as a child. The Tale is a worthy, honest and compelling film, but it is not something one can enjoy.

Dern slips into the role of Jennifer Fox (the director uses her real name for the narrative). We meet a middle-aged Fox when she receives a call from her mother, who has discovered an essay she wrote about her relationship with her boyfriend. The reason for the call is that the boyfriend in question, Bill, a horse-riding coach in a summer-camp she attended, was a 40-something man.

Jason Ritter and Elizabeth Debicki as Bill and Mrs G in The Tale. (Photo: HBO)

But Jennifer has only a vague recollection of the events of that summer. She does recall that she had a sort of a “relationship”, but remembers it as a beautiful thing, and thinks she was old enough to decide for herself. Not old enough to be an adult, perhaps but at least post-pubescent.

On her mother’s insistence, she tries to dig deeper and turns her sharp, precise documentarian gaze upon herself.

In her imagination, she was older and more sophisticated than she actually was. The realisation strikes her that she was burying the unpleasant memories of that summer deep inside her brain and cooked up an alternate version of the events so she will not have to deal with what really happened. This was her mind’s way of coping with the trauma.

There is a visual dissonance that comes when Jennifer corrects her memory of a slender, 15-year-old girl to a boyish 13-year-old pre-pubescent girl she really was in that summer camp after her mother shows her old photos. It would be statutory rape either way, but Jennifer tells herself it was the 70s. Such things happened back then, didn’t they?

That summer was not the fairytale season she remembers it to be. With help of Mrs G, another equestrian instructor, Bill sexually groomed and raped Jennifer. Too young and innocent to comprehend what was happening, she went along with it, even as she threw up every time afterwards. She was told she is special and for a young girl who thought herself as unwanted in her household of five children, the attention Bill and Mrs G showered over her was too much to resist.

Dern portrays the role with a subtlety and easy confidence. For a movie that is disconcerting, it is also hard to look away from The Tale. And that is mostly thanks to Dern in what is probably a career-best performance. She was Jennifer Fox’s first choice and seems to have brought her own understanding of what is a very personal story. It must have been such an incredibly difficult role and performance to nail down, but Dern makes it look effortless.