Sarah Polley’s Take This Waltz, ends as it begins: with cooking, pauses, and the slow creep of anxious disappointment. Margot (Michelle Williams) finishes beating eggs, presses her head against a closed oven door, and listens to a cooking buzzer go off, staring blankly ahead. In the background, the shadowed figure of a male partner stares out a window; the dialogue between their bodies is atomised, detached and alienated. We learn, by the conclusion, that these scenes are in fact one and the same. That may be the ultimate lesson of Polley’s sophomore film, which takes its name from Leonard Cohen’s famous song: throughout, Margot took pains to avoid anxiety, alienation and the pain of wondering whether she would miss something. Yet at film’s end, Margot has ended up back in her inner world, detached and unsure of what she might have missed.
Opening in Louisberg, Nova Scotia, Take This Waltz begins with a literal beating of an adulterer. Margot, travelling to write about Louisberg’s historical re-enactments for a Canadian publication, encounters one such re-enactment in which town officials are condemning a man guilty of adultery. Asked to perform the staged whipping, Margot does so reluctantly and lightly; she is clearly uncomfortable with the strange theatrics of it all. In the crowd, a male tourist with dark brown hair shouts: “harder! put your back into it!” That man turns out to be Daniel, Margot’s next-door-neighbor. Uncannily, they had never before met.
To illustrate the meeting of Margot and Daniel (another uncanny shared airplane ride in which each watches the other sleep, a shared taxi ride back to their mutual neighborhood full of delicate, tortured pangs spoken only in body language), Polley takes familiar tropes from storied romantic comedies and explodes them
Daniel and Margot, upon returning to Little Portugal, Toronto, begin slowly to act out a sacrosanct fascination with each other. Meeting in the early morning for coffee, swimming together at the local Y, they are careful never to cross the cultural line that demarcates infidelity, yet everything about this shade of intimacy feels adulterous. That borderland, between infatuation, flirting and infidelity, between deceit and disclosure, is where Margot and Daniel blossom. Theirs is a love predicated on the romance of indecision and uncertainty. A.O. Scott notes this: “Daniel, for his part, does not push himself on Margot but does not exactly push her away either. He hovers in the middle distance, letting her know that he is interested and available should her ambivalence resolve in his favor.”
Make no mistake about the malignant power of tone. Take This Waltz uses sweetness as sedative. The alienation that accompanies long-term intimacy, inarticulable yet ever present malaise, what “selfishness” looks like in practice: no lighting scheme, or soundtrack, can fully numb the viewer to the gaping wounds Polley gives vivid image and texture. Adult relationships ultimately function in ways that the culture can’t neatly explain with deference to marriage and monogamy. Margot slowly realizes that one relationship might never satisfy her, and Polley’s refusal to look away from this fact, or offer us an anesthesthetized view of her pain, is the definitive measurement of nuanced filmmaking. Showing how two loves co-exist simultaneously, full of mess and unease, Polley is building a subtle but unmissable cultural counternarrative. It challenges the script: of monogamous marriage, of romantic dualism, and does so without pretending that these discoveries, this “liberation” comes without deep, scarring pain.
How does a delicate, emotional tragedy, in the vein of Revolutionary Road or Blue Valentine, play out for much of its run with the gaiety of an indie romantic comedy? Simply: Take This Waltz could not deliver the heartbreak it builds up to without first creating a happiness that is anything but simple exposition. By paying deft attention to the felt uncertainty between Margot and Daniel, and through a compassionate and honest rendering of Lou: his vulnerabilities and his needs, Polley gives us a beautiful, often prickingly funny and yes happy world. She invites us to grow fond of, feel comfortable inside and even envy it. However, none of these elements would hold Polley’s narrative together if not for its central thread: Margot. Through Margot, Polley totally re-imagines a flawed heroine. This re-imagining (of Margot’s intentionality, of her motives and of the consequences she faces) is profoundly consequential.
In Phillip French’s review of Take This Waltz for the Guardian, the critic notes that Sarah Polley has centered both of her feature films around the topic of marriage; both marital subjects have been Canadian. While the director makes clear in both Away from Her and Waltz that she is positioning her protagonists as “liberals,” (this is clear when Fiona gasps “how could they forget Vietnam?”), she troubles the notion in both cases of what a “liberal” marriage might look like. For “enlightened” and progressive people, what kind of pressures might cause relationships to buckle? What becomes of couples that are committed to healthy communication, who choose to be married, and seem to hold no particular reverence for institutional marriage? Under Polley’s direction, the political tone of Take This Waltz, remains pointedly faint, never more than a hovering backdrop. And yet the messages Waltz conveys, about monogamy, vulnerability, human commitments to each other, all betray a Canadian sensibility: Polley pays attention and respect to the notion of the multiple, and of the contradictory. Polley respects that in marriage, like in larger culture and life, the many (loves, needs, beauties, wounds) can exist together, though not always comfortably. In Waltz, the limits of monogamy test, and ultimately break, the bonds of a loving marriage. But equally important is what this rupture did not break: Polley is very careful to show that none of the major players in this love triage are ever destroyed or forced to lose their sense of self. Margot, Daniel and perhaps most importantly Lou, all remain intact and whole, if imperfect and still lost, throughout the ordeal.
To better understand exactly how Polley’s work is a reflection of her Canadian sensibility (and the deference to pluralism inherent in that sensibility), it is useful to contrast Take This Waltz with a contemporary American film that studies the same primary issue: the strange intimacy and ugliness of marriage. In style, tone and moral narrative, David Fincher’s Gone Girl could not possibly be a greater departure from the intimate storytelling of Take This Waltz. Where Gone Girl explores the painful side effects that capitalism, status obsession and image presentation have on American marriages, Waltz sees the more fundamental vulnerabilities of marital intimacy.
One argument that has frequently been invoked by critics in defense of Gone Girl is a larger “defense of art.” Maureen Dowd was particularly pointed in her defense of the film, seeing in its critiques a larger threat by the “niceness thought police” to censor provocative art. “Art is meant to explore all the unattractive inner realities as well as to recommend glittering ideals. It is not meant to provide uplift or confirm people’s prior ideological assumptions. Art says ‘Think,’ not ‘You’re right.’” Dowd goes on to say that “had the niceness police won,” many of the literary world’s most important heroines would never have followed their trajectories.
Writing in Vulture, Amanda Dobbins had this to say about the relationship between misogyny and female anti-heroism in Gone Girl: “I have been thinking about the misogyny question, in part because I can't have a conversation about the movie without it coming up. I'm not convinced, because I think Flynn is fundamentally right: Women can be antiheroes and villains, too, and the portrayal of such women and their actions does not automatically constitute contempt.” While the debate around Gone Girl and misogyny continues to swirl, one thing seems obvious: Sarah Polley succeeds where David Fincher fails in writing a whole, sympathetic and flawed female anti-hero. By leaning into the discomfort and vulnerability conveyed in equal measure by Margot, Lou and Daniel, Polley chooses to paint these qualities not as fatalistic flaws, betraying a deeper darkness, but rather as conflicting human needs interacting with each other. By doing this, and avoiding absolutes, Polley succeeds in making Margot a flawed character with complete agency.
Two almost-parallel scenes illustrate the fundamental divide. Gone Girl, opens to Ben Affleck in a bedroom caressing his wife’s hair while simultaneously whispering violent threats into her ear. Holding her head, he delicately threatens to “break her skull.” In another bedroom, Margot and Daniel share a bed, and wake up to each other, spooning. While gently snuggling, Margot and Daniel launch playful threats: “I’m going to push your spleen through a rusty meet grinder!” Where Gone Girl uses this scene to singularly illustrate Ben Affleck’s motives and needs, Waltz conveys a mutual relationality. Polley isn’t hiding from the ugly in marriage; Margot and Luke’s playful game does convey an awkward unease and a faint dissatisfaction with each other. But where Fincher denies Amy agency in Gone Girl’s answer to this scene, Polley makes sure to emphasize the mutuality of the joking. Margot is shown as an agent of the banter.
Polley’s exploration of the inner world of a marriage, and the ways in which that intimacy begins to unravel and knot over time, demonstrates deeply held artistic and political values about pluralism. Margot feels a deep love and connection with Lou; the frays and annoyances and frictions of that love are not meant to illustrate any inherent fragmentation. Margot and Lou don’t always meet each other’s eyes, they don’t always laugh at each other’s jokes; they feel injured by small rejections and they don’t always want to have sex with each other. Polley hovers above these domestic minituae not because she wants to lay groundwork for a crumbling marriage, not to say “I told you so” to her audience, but to show how much it matters for its own sake.
That’s what makes Polley’s exploration of marital norms so stunning: she never reveals a “hidden darkness” behind Lou or does Margot the disservice of villainization. By denying the plot an easy polarity, and by refusing to give us characters to root for, Polley gives us much more: a plot we can relate to and people we can deeply empathize with. Neither Lou nor Margot are catalysts in their failed marriage. Instead, the tragedy that Polley so deftly conveys is shown through the trying.
In a Guardian interview about Take This Waltz, Polley spoke at some length about larger themes from the film. "We're all kind of ugly in our relationships," she says. "I have a friend who thinks that you find someone who will take you and then you reveal yourself. There's a certain sense in which we don't really want that revealed self to be known by the outside world." As Margot learns, upon leaving Lou, the process of self revelation is not unique to one marriage. She and Daniel move in together, learn each other’s inner language (or do the best job they can of learning it), and slowly tire of each other. Polley doesn’t paint this as a tragedy, but she isn’t gentle with the devastation Margot feels. After hoping that a new love would fix the “gaps in life,” learning that nothing necessarily can is deeply sad. Polley doesn’t write out any takeaways from the film; she has no instruction manual for curious viewers. “Feminism,” “Capitalism,” “Monogamy,” and “Wondering” might all be prevailing themes, but don’t expect Polley to give any precise judgments on them; it’s not really the point. What Polley does say, though, about the way in which romantic love interacts with selfishness in Waltz, reflects her sensible and compassionate approach to showing a facet of life. “You can fall in love with yourself through someone else's eyes for a little while; then you see yourself as you really are again and it's sort of devastating."
I really enjoyed reading this analysis. Take this Waltz is being added to my movie list. Thanks!
You make me want to see this film ASAP, John. What did you think of Polley’s doc, Stories We Tell? I bet you could write a brilliant essay about that one, too!