TIFF ‘11: Take This Waltz review
The sophomore feature from actress turned filmmaker Sarah Polley looks to examine love, infidelity and whether one person can be everything to someone else indefinitely. Michelle Williams stars as Margot, a writer who on an assignment in Nova Scotia meets Daniel (Luke Kirby). They flirt briefly and Margot wonders if they’ve met before. The two end up seated next to each other on the flight back to Toronto together and continue this flirtation in a shared cab together when he reveals that he lives across the street from her. She reveals that she’s married. Her husband Lou (Seth Rogen)—a chef in the middle of writing a cookbook solely devoted to ways of cooking chicken— isn’t distant, cold or aloof but instead warm, loving, devoted.
This becomes a problem because Margot continues to see Daniel. At first she wakes up a little earlier to run into him on the street as he’s off to work as a rickshaw driver (ugh). It becomes impossible to sympathize with her as she continues to get closer and closer to the edge of actually cheating. She asks him to describe how he would fuck her (in a prolonged scene), they swim in a pool together, ride around in an amusement park, she goes to his house. She tells him she loves him. She does everything except make actual physical contact, breaking away when he touches her leg.
The film is shot beautifully, Williams’ Margot is a hipster princess lit warmly by Luc Montpellier’s sun dappled cinematography but her character is nearly insufferable. She’s the manic pixie dream girl as a basket case nightmare. You don’t fall for her, you want her to run off with the rickshaw driver so that Rogen can move on because he deserves better. And if this film were about Margot fucking up her life that would be fine but the filmmaker seems to want us to sympathize with her and we just don’t. She is a girl who refuses to grow up, never tries talking to Lou, never seems to really turn on him, she spends the day making kissy faces at Daniel then returns home to her husband to be lovey with him.
Their marriage is portrayed as a series of endless tics. They have word games, private jokes, playful touchy routines and nothing resembling a real relationship. Have these two known each other for 6 weeks? Supposedly they have been married for 5 years but don’t seem to know each other at all. It’s all empty. However the thing that saves the film from complete unwatchability is Rogen who is great here in a more dramatic role. He nails every moment perfectly and you root for him the entire film. He’s tried his hand at more dramatic roles before (stretching even in Apatow’s “Funny People”) with mixed results but here he never falters.
Despite the cinematography, Rogen’s performance and few nice moments (Williams at the amusement park is pretty great) the film goes off the rails completely in the final act. There is a WTF montage you will have to see to believe set to Leonard Cohen’s “Take This Waltz” (hence the title) and it’s just jaw droppingly bad. Should also mention the film features a notable performance from Sarah Silverman playing a Lou’s sister, a recovering alcoholic. The comedienne is good in the part but most of her press has been around her nude scene in the film. There is a shower sequence that has got to be one of the most gratuitous nude scenes in film history. We get women come in all shapes and sizes, we’re just not sure what this has to do with the themes of this film.
There is a line in the film about how everything new gets old eventually, meant to recap that the excitement of a new relationship will fade too. Unfortunately that’s not what the film is about. We’re not seduced by the promise of her relationship with Daniel nor are we supposed to fret for Margot for fucking things up. It straddles the line where we’re supposed to understand why she does things but we never do. She acts childish and inexplicably never accepting responsibility for her actions or tries to have an adult conversation. The film is as frustrating to watch as it is to describe.
