Sarah Polley (2011)

Sarah Polley received a lot of praise for her first feature Away From Her but this second one is more ambitious and more interesting.  It’s possible that Polley was intimidated by adapting Alice Munro for the screen.   Here she’s working from her own original screenplay, and the adjective is apt:  Polley is trying to do something difficult, and to bring to life complex relationships.  She’s not completely successful but the attempt is always absorbing and often exciting.  Thirtyish Margot (Michelle Williams) lives with her husband Lou (Seth Rogen) in a Toronto suburb.   They’re both writers of sorts – he of cookbooks comprising chicken recipes, she of copy for a regional tourist board.   Margot’s on a business trip when she meets Daniel (Luke Kirby).  They travel back to Toronto together and Margot discovers that Daniel – an artist who pays the rent by working as a (pedestrian) rickshaw driver – lives just across the street.   They are obviously attracted to one other and since she and Lou no longer have sex together Margot might seem to have good reason to start a physical relationship with another man.  But Take This Waltz is, until the closing stages, nearly all talk.  It makes you aware of your expectations as a filmgoer that you share Daniel’s increasing frustration that Margot won’t go to bed with him.

Anthony Lane in the New Yorker and Catherine Wheatley in Sight & Sound both criticise the dialogue and it’s true that Sarah Polley puts more than one foot wrong with the lines she gives Margot.  When she explains to Daniel shortly after they first meet that ‘I’m scared of connections’ this immediately sticks out as a double meaning.  (For those of us who don’t travel much beyond the cinema the hidden meaning is actually the more obvious one, even if the conversation is taking place on a plane.)   Margot makes repeated failed attempts to arouse Lou.  On one of these occasions she rails at him for humiliating her – Margot says it’s crazy that she needs to summon up the courage to try and seduce her husband but that he always manages to make her end up feeling she’s been taking a risk greater than she can cope with.  Although this speech makes sense, it’s too polished in the messy bathroom circumstances in which it’s delivered.   But there’s much more good dialogue than bad in Take This Waltz and the wordiness is essential to the scheme of the movie.  At one of their first meetings, Daniel asks Margot for a date and she agrees – at a specific place on a specific date in thirty years’ time:  ‘till then I’m married’.  Verbalising his sexual fantasies about her is all that Margot will allow Daniel to do.  Joky patter is an important part of Lou’s keeping at bay sex and serious conversation with his wife.

The film takes a long time to gather momentum.  Its description of Margot and Lou’s life together is painstakingly detailed but painfully slow-moving.  You feel you’ve got the point and you want Polley to move forward yet you realise too that the oppressive sameness of the couple’s domestic routines is crucial to the story.  Margot’s relationships with Lou and Daniel aren’t fully resolved or tidily explained.  Margot can’t understand why, whenever she’s in the shower at home, there’s always a burst of cold water halfway through.   Once he comes to realise that she’s mad about Daniel and their marriage is over, Lou owns up to chucking cold water into the shower without Margot’s being able to see him.  He describes this as ‘a long-term joke’ – something he was going to tell her when they were an old couple:  it seems that Lou was hoping the relationship could get by for decades to come on the idiosyncratic, often childish sense of humour that he and Margot share.  Yet Polley doesn’t polarise the relationships as sex versus companionship (the choice that Margot faces might be easier if it were starker).  She and Daniel can make each other laugh; Margot still finds Lou physically attractive; there’s no suggestion that his reluctance to have sex with her means he has repressed homosexual feelings.  When he talks sex to Margot, Luke Kirby manages to imply that Daniel senses in these performances something unsatisfactory beyond the lack of a physical relationship.   Daniel talks to Margot about going into her hard.  When they eventually have sex, after Margot has left Lou, that’s what Daniel does:  his earlier words resonate with what’s on screen.   But it makes sense too that Margot finds living with Daniel a disappointment.

At the start of the film, we see Margot baking and Michelle Williams’ face exudes sad dissatisfaction.   Polley reprises this moment at the end of Take This Waltz.  It was only at this point that I realised the first sequence had introduced all the intervening action of the film as something which had already happened.   (I’d overlooked that life with Lou means that Margot never cooks and didn’t twig that the opening bit wasn’t happening in their kitchen.)   After the slow pace and the non-eventfulness of most of what’s gone before, the tempo of the last part of Take This Waltz is odd and disorienting.  Her relationship with Daniel could hardly be further from a whirlwind romance but when Margot moves in with him Polley creates a whirling montage of sex scenes, including the couple having sex as part of threesomes and foursomes.  It all seems fantastic and to chime with Margot’s and our disbelief that it’s actually happening.   Immediately after this, the film wobbles in the first part of the sequence in which Margot gets a call to go back and see Lou and his family and discovers that his sister Geraldine (Sarah Silverman), who has a history of drink problems, has fallen off the wagon:  the scene is melodramatic in a too familiar way.   However, the conversation between Margot and Lou that follows it redeems the situation.  Like Daniel, we always sensed that, if she got her dream man in reality, Margot would find her new life with him partly unsatisfying.  Yet it isn’t unsatisfying enough for her to leave Daniel (as far as we can see) or to go back to her husband.

In this film Sarah Polley concentrates not only on one woman’s psychological and sexual life but, in one startling but oddly beautiful sequence, on female physicality.  Margot accompanies Geraldine to a ladies’ aquarobics session (Damien Atkins does an amusing turn as the male instructor) and we see the women in the showers afterwards.   Margot and Geraldine are much younger than most of the others and it’s the older, fatter bodies that dominate the full frontal images.  (In spite of this emphasis and the lack of any homoerotic implication in the scene, Polley’s delight in the bodies on display brings to mind Alan Hollinghurst’s rhapsodic description of the variety of cocks in evidence in the showers of The Swimming Pool Library.)   Polley nicely contrasts the physical frankness with a later scene, when Margot and Daniel go for a late night swim at the same public baths.  Their underwater courtship is lovely but chaste; their swimming costumes mean that, after the scene in the showers, Margot and Daniel are relatively very clothed.  Michelle Williams’ portrait of Margot confirms her as one of the most interesting screen actors of her generation – under close scrutiny from the camera she never hits a false note.   Williams is now in her early thirties but her slenderness and the simple beauty of her face enable her to suggest someone much younger and she has a protean quality in Take This Waltz, depending on whether Margot is joking with Lou or trying for ‘mature’ self-assurance to parry Daniel’s attentions.  She plays a woman who isn’t easily likeable and plays her honestly – yet I was always rooting for Margot.

Neither of the men is as fully realised as characters but they’re very well played by Seth Rogen and Luke Kirby.   Sarah Polley is hard on Lou:  stressing his limitations through the fact that his culinary repertoire doesn’t extend beyond chicken, although it allows for a few good jokes, is a bit too unkind – especially given the connotation of ‘chicken’ when applied to people.   As if to compensate Rogen, Polley gives Lou a big monologue to camera when the marriage is at the end of its tether but her heart doesn’t seem to be in this:  the jump cuts she uses here (and nowhere else) distract attention from Rogen and Polley’s decision not to show Margot’s reactions to what she’s hearing adds to the artificiality.  Still, Seth Rogen plays Lou with empathy and a lot of skill – as when Lou gets excited about the rickshaw ride Daniel offers to him and Margot as they leave the house for a wedding anniversary outing.  Casting someone best known for comedy in the role gives an extra edge to Lou’s using eccentric humour as a blind.  Catherine Wheatley suggests that Daniel might almost be a figment of Margot’s imagination throughout.  Luke Kirby’s performance works so well, I think, because, under Polley’s intelligent direction, he registers as an independent consciousness as well as the object of Margot’s desire.

The heat and sweat of a Toronto summer – on faces and arms, on Daniel’s shirt as he takes Margot and Lou on the twilight rickshaw ride – are important to the film’s visual scheme.  (Considering how annoying London rickshaw drivers are in reality, it’s a tribute to the director and the actors that this scene is strongly engaging.)   Polley and her cinematographer Luc Montpellier create some lovely shots of the city and its environs.  Margot watches Daniel heading off early each morning to Lake Ontario; its shores become a place of dawning in more ways than one.  These pretty pictures might be dismissed as conventionally romantic in a different film; here they have the weight of a counterpoint to the tensions in the relationships happening in the foreground of the movie.  Take This Waltz takes its title from a Leonard Cohen song, which is part of the soundtrack (along with some wimpier numbers), but it also refers to two sequences on fairground waltzers.  In the first, Margot and Luke are together; in the second, which closes the film, Margot is alone.   The swiftly shifting emotions of Michelle Williams and Luke Kirby in the earlier sequence and of Williams in her concluding solo are incisively expressed and Polley uses Buggles’ ‘Video Killed the Radio Star’ to score both sequences – inexplicably but highly effectively.  The film feels long but I think this is because of how much the people in it have taken hold and how far you feel you’ve been with them.

22 August 2012