Take This Waltz (MA). Director: Sarah Polley. Starring. Michelle Williams, Luke Kirby, Seth Rogen. 112 minutes
A group of women debate whether fondness and familiarity with a long-term spouse are not better than the thrill and passion of a new relationship. If you still like your husband after decades of marriage, one argues, then that is both fortunate and preferable to the uncertainty of starting over with a new and unproven partner.
Besides, interjects another, everything new gets old. The scene takes place in a communal shower at a local swimming pool, and the contrast between the women's varied naked bodies reinforces the truth of this statement.
Take This Waltz is an intimate study of one failing marriage, and of a woman torn between the familiarity of the 'old' and the excitement and danger of the new.
It is actor Michelle Williams' second film about marriage breakdown in as many years, following 2010's devastating Blue Valentine. The marital disintegration that was the subject of that film was marked by accelerating and mutually destuctive ferocity. In Take This Waltz the breakdown is more passive and wearying, but no less horrific.
Margot (Williams) has been married to Lou (Rogen) for five years. It seems that the majority of their interactions these days are of an affectionately infantile nature: she speaks in a faux baby voice while he coos and cajoles her.
Watching these private moments feels like an invasion, but they are utterly revelatory about the nature of this relationship. Rogen, a brash comic actor who is surprisingly effective in this more dramatic role, and the always-superb Williams, nail the dynamic perfectly. To Lou this playfulness is a mark of intimacy, while to Margot it is a kind of deflection; at one point she is appalled when Lou tries to kiss her in the midst of one of these games.
In fact writer-director Polley hints frequently that Margot is in a state of arrested development. When Margot uses dated slang, a friend quips that she is stuck in 1982; we know indirectly that 1982 was actually Margot's birth year. Another key scene for Margot's character is soundtracked by the early 1980s hit 'Video Killed the Radio Star'. The film's title comes from a Leonard Cohen song that would have been released during Margot's childhood.
Margot's marital ennui, masked by this 'baby game' with Lou, is exacerbated by her attraction to their artist neighbour, Daniel (Kirby). Tellingly, the attraction is as much about