Girl is married to boy. Girl meets new boy. Girl’s marriage is threatened. The plot of Sarah Polley’s new film, Take this Waltz, is as boilerplate as a romance paperback, but it’s filled with quiet revelations, anchored by yet another masterful performance from Michelle Williams.
We all know that women can be just as hedonistically self-destructive as men – just as prone to heedlessly follow a sexual desire as it barrels toward an acrimonious implosion – even though Hollywood, to its discredit, has rarely presented such women to us. Take This Waltz is a breath of fresh air indeed, even while it leaves a pungent aftertaste.
Williams plays Margot, a freelance writer in Toronto who is married to Seth Rogen’s Lou, a cookbook writer. During a travel assignment, she meets Daniel (Luke Kirby), a handsome stranger who just happens to be traveling back on the same flight she is, and who just happens to have booked a seat next to hers, and who just happens to have lived across the street from her for some time.
There’s a lot of “just happens” here, and none of this activity has been secretly orchestrated, as in a Christopher Nolan plot. But stranger things have occurred in life, so we’ll put this implausible pileup of coincidences to rest. Besides, it’s more rewarding to imbibe Williams’ ever-shifting mien, a mask covering a performance of intense interiority.
The film opens as she cooks a meal in her sun-dappled home, the camera sliding in and out of focus, watching as her aproned form sinks to the hardwood floor and stares into oblivion with a helpless look that says “Save me.” Later, while watching Daniel sleep on the airplane, she gazes forlornly at the fantasy he represents – imagining, as most of have at one time or another, the possibly of another life.
Polley is a better director than she is a screenwriter. Her characters have a habit of psychoanalyzing themselves with enviable clarity. “I don’t like being in between things,” explains Margot, after informing Daniel of her strange phobia of connecting flights. “I’m afraid of being afraid.”
Such statements may eventually result after several therapy sessions, but in Take This Waltz, three of the four above-the-title actors (Sarah Silverman, as Lou’s alcoholic sister, is the fourth) diagnose themselves with striking lucidity, in effect reciting their characters’ subtext and doing the job us critics are supposed to do.
This may be a rookie mistake for Polley; this is only her second feature screenplay after Away From Her, a love triangle of a different sort. But behind the camera, she has the vision of a seasoned pro. She fosters extraordinary chemistry between Williams and Rogen, whose infectious rapport is undermined by the fragile gnaw of disconnection – of their marital tether gradually coming loose.
The solid ground of their quaint home has suddenly become a battlefield of eggshells, and every conversation feels loaded with pregnant, unspoken meaning, or the perception of meaning. Left to watch (and cook) as his wife drifts away from him, Rogen reveals a tortured emotional core that he merely hinted at expressing in 50/50; it might be his best performance yet.
Margot will either leave Lou, or she won’t. Polley does, eventually, take a position on the issue, but it doesn’t matter, not for Margot anyway. The movie resonates as well as it does because of the character’s constant halo of despair and loneliness, no matter who she happens to share a bed with. For damaged people, when fantasies become reality, they cease to be fantasies, lose their excitement, and leave the thrill-seeker once again lost between connections, looking for the next life like a junkie graduating to the next drug.
In the best moment in the film, Margot and Daniel are concluding a clandestine “date” on a strobe-lit thrill ride in a entertainment complex, to the strains of Video Killed the Radio Star (appropriately enough, a song about one era extinguishing a previous one). The music, the ride and the fantasy stop, mid-verse and mid-swing, leaving the couple bathed in the harsh light of their new reality.
TAKE THIS WALTZ. Director: Sarah Polley; Cast: Michelle Williams, Luke Kirby, Seth Rogen, Sarah Silverman; Distributor: Magnolia; Rating: R; Opens: Friday at Living Room Theaters at FAU, Lake Worth Playhouse, Cinema Paradiso in Fort Lauderdale, The Tower Theatre in Miami, Bill Cosford Cinema at the University of Miami.