Michelle in a ‘Waltz’
Is there another actor working today whose face registers the extraordinary range of emotions Michelle Williams can display? Even in a film as false as Sarah Polley’s “Take This Waltz,” her swiftly shifting expressions feel unerringly true.
The concept is simple enough: A young woman can no longer hide the dissatisfaction she feels in her marriage. But Polley approaches this intimate subject with an odd sort of ostentation, as if the banality of ordinary life weren’t important enough for her movie.
So we don’t just have men and women falling in and out of love, as people do. We have hipster rickshaw drivers, couples who engage in violent baby talk and twentysomething friends who join senior citizen aqua-fitness classes because, presumably, Pilates would be too predictable.
It’s a shame Polley drowns the vitally mundane in so much indie quirk, because her committed leads work hard to create a touching familiarity together.
Williams is Margot, a Toronto writer who is happy, more or less, with her easygoing husband, Lou (Seth Rogen). So she’s dismayed to find herself falling for her intense neighbor, Daniel (Luke Kirby), the aforementioned rickshaw driver. Margot could use some help sorting out these unexpected feelings, but her best friend (an acerbic Sarah Silverman) has problems of her own.
Polley’s last film, “Away From Her,” was so strikingly mature that this effort — which she both wrote and directed — feels like a considerable step backward. She overemphasizes every point, both verbally and visually, when her subject matter really calls for gentle delicacy.
Fortunately, the actors, especially Williams and Rogen, underplay even the most heavy-handed scenes. No matter how far afield the screenplay wanders, they remain steadfastly faithful to the themes at its core.