Chicken or egg

Take This Waltz

Crit

OK, Sarah Polley is 1 for 2 as a director, which isn't bad for a 33-year-old, but she owes us one after this. Life, literature, and country music have led me to believe that the phenomenon of divided love is not uncommon, but Polley (who also wrote the screenplay) here portrays it as a function of infantilism.

Margot (Michelle Williams) and Lou (Seth Rogen) are a 28-year-old couple married 5 years, and they are in love, which they demonstrate via an amorous idiom of juvenile violence, which is about 1 part charming to 9 parts annoying. Then Daniel (Luke Kirby) shows up across the street, and Margot falls in love, ruling the affair as if it's OK to make it as sexual as possible (a verbal ravishing by Daniel is one scene that does work) without touching. I wouldn't have thought it possible to be so enraged by a character played by Williams, but it is so.

Then, once the inevitable happens, Polley misses a chance to cut her losses and instead gives us another 20 minutes of of life going on, mostly unsurprisingly.