Take This Waltz

365 Films

Entry #96

Take This Waltz (2012)

Directed by Sarah Polley

Sarah Polley’s sophomore effort Take This Waltz (following Away From Her, also definitely worth checking out) could be described as the ultimate summer movie.  This is not to imply that it features jive-talking giant robots or that it’s origins were spawned on the pages of a Marvel of DC comic book, but more to mean that it is literally and physically about summer.  You can feel the oppressiveness of the humidity and the heat-induced pop to the color palette that almost becomes suffocating at times.  And it makes sense for this story of stifled but eventually fulfilled desire to take place during this particularly sweaty time of year.  Summer is the most transient of the seasons and its elusiveness mirrors the overwhelming joy of life that the main character Margot (Michelle Williams) doggedly pursues at an almost self-destructive pace.  This is a film entirely about being in a state of constant flux.  Even the title itself implies a new transition into an already in progress series of movements (well, that and it’s a Leonard Cohen song).  It’s also a remarkable advancement in filmmaking confidence from writer/director Sarah Polley (and her new documentary, Stories We Tell is an even bolder achievement).  While her first film is practically buried in a mountain of white snow, it also follows a fairly established narrative linearity by way of the short story upon which it is based.  Take This Waltz, on the other hand basks in its visceral color scheme and freewheeling, anything goes mode of story telling.  Polley isn’t interested in the traditional moments that usually represent cinematic relationships; she’s interested in the clutter in between all of that.  For example we never see or are explained how Margot and her cookbook-writing husband Lou (Seth Rogen) met, we never see their courtship, and most importantly (spoiler warning), we don’t see the moment when Margot initiates their termination.  Margot’s relationship with Daniel (Luke Kirby) on the other hand is all intense connection and barely concealed desire.  Polley doesn’t waste any time with expository scenes of information where the two “get to know each other” because they both already have each other figured out.  If their airplane meet-cute has you convinced that the movie belongs to their coupling, Polley agrees and sees it only as a matter of time until these two magnetic existences are eventually pulled towards one another.  The subject of adultery is one that’s usually handled with kid gloves in mainstream cinema.  It is either the subject for an erotic thriller or a shame-inducing finger wagging by the likes of Tyler Perry.  What’s most gratifying about Take This Waltz is Polley’s emotional generosity towards her characters.  Everybody has his or her reasons and no one is first to the chopping block in terms of assigning blame.  Margot may be selfish and immature but she also genuinely loves Lou and tries to do everything she can to avoid hurting him.  Lou is sweet, goofy, and charming but also a little too inwardly aloof and wishes to marinate in the bliss of his collegiate years where (presumably) his relationship with Margot began.  This is astounding for the plain and simple fact that movies like this usually attempt to give their characters very clear-cut and simple choices to eventually make.  You cheat on someone because they are either a horrible brute or a smothering bore.  Take This Waltz recognizes that there will always be an inner void even in the most outwardly satisfying of relationships.  The question is do you embrace it or spend the rest of your life trying to fill it.  Take This Waltz has nothing as simplifying as an answer to this question and it is all the more uncompromising and emotionally harrowing for it.