Sarah Polley’s Take this Waltz begins with two heavy metaphors that persist throughout her tale that documents the tribulations of long-term relationships, when comfort and complacency takes the place of excitement and romance. As we meet Margot (Michelle Williams), she is taking notes at a Colonial-themed village. They’ve hired her to rewrite their promotional pamphlets, and, on this day, she – and others – are privy a re-enactment of a public pillorying. The man on his knees lamely begs for forgiveness as the Sharpie-scrawled “adulterer” hangs on a crudely cut board like an albatross around his neck. Of the gathering crowd, Margot is chosen to whip the man, and she does – at first timidly, but as she’s cheered on by the crowd, her wrist really gets into it.
Initially, this moment detracted my interest from the rest of the film, prophesying it as yet another film that quickly introduces the adultery trope and leaves the audience trying to decide who should be vilified: the husband for being out of touch, the wife for being weak, the callow mister for not following bro code.
But Take this Waltz is different. Sure, it piles on an additional metaphor only shortly after when Margot runs into her eventual infatuation on the plane, and she explains that she’s “afraid of connections” – in airports of course. And the existence of Geraldine (Sarah Silverman), while amusing feels a bit inorganic. However, Michelle Williams gives a characteristically solid performance as a woman who married too young (23) and is now wondering who else exists instead of Lou (Seth Rogan), the “kindest, gentlest person in the world.” Lou’s aloofness and sweetness is what heightens the tension of this film. He is at the same time oblivious and earnest. He loves Margot, smiles at her, entertains her juvenile (often annoying) antics, yet he’s entered a comfortable zone where he starts taking her advances for granted. Most often he stands over the stove (he’s a chef writing a book about cooking chicken), with his back to Margot. Each time she approaches him, there’s a temerity in her movement, and she becomes a child afraid of rejection. Unbeknownst to Lou, the focus he holds on his food reinforces her cowardice and the momentarily passionate touching fizzles with familiarity or perfunctory silliness.
Throughout, it’s as if humor both hides the frustration and becomes an outlet for sublimated desires centered on sex and anger (not always that well veiled). In the morning, they lay in bed and tell each other “I love you so much…,” finishing it with wacky terms of endearment like “I want to take a potato masher and mash your face with it,” or “I want to rape you with a potato peeler.” Certainly, this bespeaks familiarity, but it’s also a morbid exercise in passive aggression.
In the beginning, Daniel (Luke Kirby) becomes the infatuating mystery; he’s a painter who makes money by carting people around in a rickshaw (which also makes him an anachronism); he’s brooding; he’s a swinger; he’s condescending, not acquiescing; he’s not her husband; and, he lives across the street, where the grass is greener.
Regardless of the common tropes, Take this Waltz prolongs the tension between Margot and Daniel. They flirt, they seduce, they have the equivalent of phone sex, but she never physically cheats, and, in a way, this provides us hope for her marriage. She and Lou make up, they make out, but in the back of our minds, we wonder who she’s thinking about, and whether or not he knows.
The beauty of Polley’s film is the tension she creates without delving into abject cliché. Rather, she has a meticulous eye for shot selection, a solid taste in music, and a friendly gaze on characters that aren’t always that likeable. The orange and yellow hues throughout the film are subtle enough to create warmth but obvious enough to limn simultaneous sunrises and sunsets – beginning and endings with touches of august in the waning years of life and hours of a relationship.
She’s clever and the cast helps.
The best moment of the film might be at the beginning of the third act where she offer the audience a panoramic progression of Margot’s life that echoes the stagnancy of before, leaving us with a film that is less about love, loss, and regret, than it is about melancholy and the self.
