Out of Frame: Take This Waltz

Seth Rogen and Michelle Williams (Magnolia Pictures)

Margot is an underemployed writer on a travel assignment to work on a brochure for the park service. She takes notes during a reenactment of 18th century life at the Fortress of Louisberg in Nova Scotia  at the very moment when a prisoner is being lashed for adultery.  This is just the first of a number of highly telegraphed moments in this scene alone. A persistent tour guide calls on a reluctant Margot to volunteer to pretend to flog the transgressor, which is the cue for  fellow tourist Daniel (Luke Kirby, who looks like Keith Carradine morphing to Luke Perry)  to heckle her for not giving it enough. Such is meeting cute in a hipster melodrama. They meet again at the airport, where she tells Daniel and The Audience “I’m afraid of connections,” and after sharing a cab for some playful flirtation, she arrives home to tell The Other Man that she’s married. It turns out he lives across the street.

Home for Margot is a charming Victorian in Toronto with husband Lou (Seth Rogen), who’s writing a cookbook of chicken recipes, a job that we are led to believe is so successful that a phone call mid-plot asks if he can stay on another few months. “Of course I can stay another six months to finish my cookbook!  Chicken needs me!” is what I wish Rogen had said during this scene. It just makes you wonder how many improvised lines ended up on the cutting room floor.

The couple’s  relationship is mostly defined by an aggressive line of joking where she’ll say things like “I want to skin you with a potato peeler” and he’ll return with “I want to rape you with a pair of scissors till you bleed.” It reminds me of a sequence in Punch Drunk Love where Adam Sandler (in his best performance by far) makes strange and violent pillow talk with Emily Watson. The audience’s worries that she will run, but is relived by her own violently affectionate response. Here the heckling camaraderie comes off as thinly disguised aggression in a couple who has been together for five years.

Luke Kirby and Michelle Williams. (Magnolia Pictures)

Margot hopes to find herself in her shiny new boy-toy, but in another one of those telegraphed moments, an acquaintance tells Margot that "even new gets old again." I wanted to like Take this Waltz. Margot's primrose path is thoroughly by-the-numbers, but Michelle Williams' performance, and the lush cinematography by Luc Montpellier, make it watchable, if frustrating. It seems like a lost opportunity for Seth Rogen. He surely has the chops for a strong dramatic role, but Polley doesn’t seem to know what to do with him, domesticating the Rogen persona that you know would have had a ribald field day with those chickens he's always cooking. There are scenes in Take This Waltz that work beautifully, and Polley has good control of the film's tone and tragic arc. It's too bad the script is both overwritten and undercooked.

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Take this Waltz
Written and directed by Sarah Polley
With Michelle Williams, Seth Rogen, Luke Kirby, Sarah Silverman
Rated R for language, some strong sexual content and graphic nudity
Opens today at E Street and The Avalon

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