Actress Sarah Polley’s 2006 directorial debut, Away From Her, was a bit of a shock: an unexpectedly tonic drift into adultery and Alzheimer’s that somehow found a way to move us without resorting to the maudlin. What was exciting about that film was its voice — clear, confident and emotionally complex — and many wondered if it might be a fluke.
Now, with the release of Take This Waltz, we can see that it wasn’t. Unabashedly devoted to its unmoored female heroine, Margot (Michelle Williams), a 28-year-old wife beginning to wish that she weren’t, the film weaves a spell as inchoate as Margot’s discontent.
A little flaky and a lot fearful, Margot has a dull pamphlet-writing job with Parks Canada (the film was shot in Toronto) and a husband, Lou (Seth Rogen), who’s writing a cookbook about chicken. Together, the pair are cuddlesome and quirkily immature, cooing and joking in baby voices, in the comfy shorthand of the long-married.
But there’s an edge to their coziness that surfaces now and then, a space in their clowning that you could drop a refrigerator into. At these moments, Margot looks lost, Lou looks confused, and the film holds its breath.
Take This Waltz is about these spaces — between people, between jobs, between states of being — that open up and, terrifyingly, demand action. Polley knows how to evoke the restlessness that precedes a major decision, and understands the way a seemingly happy, well-matched union can contain chasms of yearning.