Sarah Polley has been acting in movies and TV shows since she was four years old: the Toronto native made her screen acting debut in the Disney feature One Magic Christmas (1985), and her role in the CBC series Road to Avonlea made her a star in Canada at age 11. By the time her screenplay for Away From Her (2006) was nominated for an Oscar, Polley had been in the movie business for nearly a quarter century, though she was still only 28. Polley’s relative youth was what made Away From Her so impressive; adapted from a short story by Alice Munro, it told the heartrending tale of a long-married couple pondering their fidelity to each other as the wife, her memory eaten away by early-onset Alzheimer’s disease, resolves to move into a nursing home. How could anyone in her late 20s, critics wondered, so persuasively depict a marriage of 44 years?
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Take This Waltz—whose July 6 release date, we learned on deadline, has been moved back to July 13—also chronicles the painful unraveling of a marriage, though in Polley’s own screenplay the characters are about her age and have been wed only five years. Margot (Michelle Williams) lives more or less contentedly with Lou (Seth Rogen), but during a business trip she strikes up an electric flirtation with the lanky, handsome Daniel (Luke Kirby), then learns to her dismay that he lives right across the street. Try as she might, Margot can’t stay away from Daniel, and their growing passion for each other eventually ruptures the marriage. There are numerous similarities between this new film and the previous one, which also involves a love triangle with the wife at the apex. But the two movies differ in one crucial respect: the spouses in Away From Her wrestle with events from the past, whereas the woman at the center of Take This Waltz is tortured by the choice between two possible futures.
Oddly, Polley has more luck dramatizing a long marriage between people in their early 60s than dramatizing a short marriage between people in their late 20s. I’m a big fan of comedic performers doing drama, and Take This Waltz features two of the more inspired talents around, Rogen and Sarah Silverman as his alcoholic sister, Geraldine. But the handful of improv-style scenes between Rogen and Michelle Williams, which are critical to the story, don’t quite come off. Lying in bed or bonding in other intimate situations, the husband and wife riff on various ideas much as Rogen and Paul Rudd, in Judd Apatow’s The 40-Year-Old Virgin, spin out a series of one-liners in response to the question “You know how I know you’re gay?” The problem is that Williams, despite her soulful allure, doesn’t really excel at this kind of performing, and as a result it’s hard to say whether these scenes are supposed to indicate the marriage’s intimacy or its superficiality.
Directed by Sarah Polley
