Reader, let’s get one thing straight: you don’t like me, and I don’t like you. You don’t like me because there’s a lame, faux-edginess to my writing style that reeks of insecurity worse than a decades-too-old-to-be-here Lothario grinding up all over you on the dancefloor of what used to be your favorite club before they started letting the infirmed in, and I don’t like you because I always assumed that at this point in my life I’d have so many Pulitzers I’d be smashing them together like action figures, possibly melting some of the older ones in the oven for my own sordid amusement, pretending they’re all the people who have over the years tried to explain to me what a run-on sentence is; yes, watching those grisly totems melt away while malicious glee spreads across my features, all the while yelling things like, “if my readers really need time to breathe that badly, Mrs. Evans, then it’s not on me to throw squiggly lines all over the place like confetti on New Year’s, it’s on them to do some fucking cardio.” I’m not sure how my thing is your fault, but I have to blame someone, and I’m obviously not going to blame myself; I mean, for heaven’s sake, I’m a future Pulitzer winner. But litigating the historicity of our blood-feud is a luxury we can ill afford – we must be swift in doing what must be done next, for we are here today for reasons bigger than either one of us but especially you, and that reason is to appreciate Michelle Williams, who is a treasure.
Take This Waltz
Watching legendary athletes try to hoist shitty teams across even the farthest boundaries of relevance is both fascinating and depressing. Of course Kobe wasn’t going to win a title with Smush-fucking-Parker at the point, or Chris Mihm at the anywhere, and chasing Shaq out of town might have been a touch on the Mad King side, but for those of us who will never have the opportunity or the hell-hard vision necessary to craft legacies out of pure air and spite the Black Mamba’s glorious mid-2000’s “I am figure-skating” phase and failure will be the closest we’ll ever come to sitting on the throne of our own rotting kingdom. I mention both this dynamic and its fascinating-if-unintentional implications because a similar effect is on display in Sarah Polley’s Take This Waltz, an indie dramedy from 2010 that you’ve heard of but never bothered to see because you were probably watching Iron Man 2 again. Take This Waltz hit me harder than any movie I’ve seen in a while, but for the life of me I can’t figure out if it’s because the film is good or if it’s because Michelle Williams wields the splinters of its broken screenplay with a causticness that, paradoxically, wouldn’t be possible were she working from more coherent material. So instead of the ensuing pages being me doing what I usually do and laying down my already-ossified opinions (peppered with dick jokes, like I know you like) I’m instead going to use the time we have left together to do what Freud used to do and think through writing, possibly while doing sarcastic amounts of blow and having sex with my patients.
Two Movies, Duking it the Fuck Out
There are essentially two different movies – or, more accurately, two different takes on the same movie – playing out in Take This Waltz, and they are of wildly different quality, especially on the back half, and the interplay between those two feuding twins adds a third layer of consideration to the offering. Luckily all of these fuckers have the same plot, so we’ll use that as both the intersection and jumping-off point between the three. Here’s the skinny:
Margot (Williams) is married to Lou (Seth Rogen) in a Toronto neighborhood so chic that there’s a 100% chance they regularly put up posters announcing their undying support for social causes they couldn’t pick out of a lineup. Lou writes cookbooks and Margot is a freelance writer, because this is an indie movie and those are the jobs you have in an indie movie. One day when on assignment in Nova Scotia Margot bumps into and shares a ride back home with Daniel, who conveniently lives across the street from Margot and Lou and who drives a rickshaw and is an outsider artist because those are the jobs you have in an indie movie. If you squint hard enough in the background of any shot in this film you can probably see Zooey Deschanel playing a ukulele.
Anyway, Margot and Daniel fall hard for each other on the ride back, and spend the trip alternating between surprising themselves with hard confessions about their deepest fears and flirting like junior high kids, with Margot only telling Daniel that she’s married at the last possible moment. Both act like this is a fatal deterrent to their mutual attraction; both know that it is not.
There, that’s all the similar stuff. Now let’s get to how the two sides of this movie are throwing haymakers at each other, Kong vs. Godzilla-style, and how this both fascinates me and makes my head hurt:
The version of this movie that is being told by its writer/director Polley is one of relatable listlessness. This is established in a masterfully-directed opening scene in which Margot, backlit and drenched in impossibly-golden light, is living a life that seems at a glance to be the kind that all of us performatively bitter edgelords secretly crave; she’s dressed down, comfortable, being rocked in and out of visibility by that sweet light, is in the kitchen cooking muffins with seemingly all the time in the world on her hands, all set to a soundtrack that sounds more like the residual heat blowing off of a dream than the work of actual instruments.
In fact, if the sheer romanticism of this scene were to strike you as deliberately belabored you’d be onto something; it’s like Margot knows she’s being watched, knows the image she should be cutting in this idyllic world of hers, one without any obvious conflict to speak of; she probably worked out long ago where to stand to maximize the golden backlight coming through the window. There’s a role she seems to feel obligated to play, and she’s playing it well. And then, when she slides the muffins into the oven and closes the door and rests there on the floor for a moment, catching her reflection in the window, we see the façade truly come down. In that uniquely-Williams capacity to suddenly carve angst-bordering-on-agony across her otherwise beatific features we see how quietly miserable Margot is. She looks at herself, and then off into the distance, like all of the easy stuff she just did was actually causing her physical pain the whole time – and we know immediately that this pain isn’t the result of anything we haven’t seen yet, but because of all the things we have. Her life is baby-smooth and without concern, and it’s killing her.
So Polley hits it out of the park, visually at least, in this opening scene, and we have our initial condition for her take on things: our protagonist has done everything correct in life, has reached an equilibrium that most of us can only fantasize about, an equilibrium that may very well only exist in movies, but is now trapped both by that same beauty and a sense of obligation to maintain it. The conflict that we’ll be tracing down is clear: how do you justify extricating yourself from an existence about which you have no real reason to complain? is your happiness really performative, or have you just entered into a newer, less unpredictable state in your life, those wild-but-tiring younger years gone without saying goodbye? how much do you owe to the other people in this world, who ask nothing of you besides kindness and an appreciation of the quotidian? is it worth giving away a lottery ticket of a life just because it’s too easy?
A film like this is challenging, sure, but also sets up understandable parameters and orients us towards a reasonable conclusion: Margot will, we assume, open up about all of this to her husband, reassure him that none of her restlessness is his fault, and then set out on a new adventure with his bittersweet blessing.
This version is fine, until it shits itself. Don’t get me wrong, Polley’s vision absolutely cooks during the first act, and even holds strong through most of the second, but it breaks up hard on re-entry. The reason for this is because our bittersweet but ultimately life-affirming movie suddenly plunges headfirst into nihilism during its last thirty or so minutes. Only douchebags start sentences with “let me be clear,” and I’ve now technically started this sentence with something else, so let me be clear: while there’s nothing wrong with a movie orienting itself towards a conclusion you wouldn’t have expected from its intro the process as undertaken in Waltz is just so jarring and unearned that both sides of the split suffer for it. It really feels like Polley decided that the initial premise of the film wasn’t challenging enough so she tried to spice up the proceedings with some late-stage Indie Film Messiness. The inherent futility of Margot’s aspirations, intimated precisely nowhere in the early stages of the film (the conflict as originally established is whether or not Margot has it in her to turn towards her own happiness, whatever form that may take, or if she is obligated to continue her performance in the idyllic life she has with Lou) suddenly engulfs the proceedings until we conclude with a weird take on The Graduate’s famously ennui-heavy ending.
Honestly, the whole thing reminded me of the play Urinetown, where the populist heroes overthrow the evil corporate goons in the final moments of the story only for the whole thing to end with a weird and thematically incoherent montage in which the good deeds of our protagonists actually make things worse for everyone than the iron-fisted rule of their wealthy overlords ever did, and then everybody dies (spoilers). There’s no reason given as to why the heroes would be shittier stewards of the city than a bunch of suits who kill people mostly for fun; it just kind of happens because Urinetown’s obnoxiously ironic narrative decides that the audience totally won’t see it coming that good deeds do society dirtier than crime ever could, so in our dénouement we basically get someone wearing all black and a beret jumping out from behind a curtain, making scary jazz hands and yelling “DARKLY IRONIC ENDING WOOOOOOOO” like the world’s dumbest ghost. I’ve got nothing against sad endings (they’re actually my favorite thing! Happiness is a lie! Kill your neighbors!) but they need to be earned, or at the very least set up in literally any way. Having your characters celebrate winning the day only to have a hitherto unseen villain kick down the door and turn them all into extra-chunky pasta sauce with an assault rifle isn’t challenging writing, it’s bad writing.
Luckily, this is the part of the story where Michelle Williams rides in on a horse with “PROFESSIONAL FUCKING ACTOR ON BOARD, EVERYBODY CALM DOWN” drawn on its flank.
You Never Go Bovary Until You Have to, Then You Go Full Fucking Bovary
The rival approach to this material comes from the lead actor herself, with Michelle Williams practically re-editing the first half of the script through her performance to make those opening scenes jive better with the later ones. Williams’ take on the material is wholly darker than Polley’s straight from the jump, and the movie as an organic whole is better for it; she wills Margot to occasionally betray that just lurking behind her supposed guilelessness is a, if not outright sinister, then at least unattractively self-serving dimension, creating a version of our protagonist who isn’t endearingly blindsided by her sudden frustration with her current life so much as riding this existence for all the thrills it’s worth before moving onto another one. Williams’ Margot increasingly sheds the skin of the innocent ingenue and slowly reveals herself to be a kind of shapeless parasite, reconstituting herself to fit into the thrust of whatever new life she finds more exciting. In Williams’ eyes the Margot we see in the opening shots of the movie cooking those muffins is not the real Margot so much as the current Margo, one who has siphoned just about as much gratification from Lou’s world as is possible and is now suffering withdrawal symptoms until she can find a new life to fake for a while.
This isn’t to say that Williams plays Margot as a villain, either – there really aren’t any villains in either version of the story. Williams’ Margot can better be described as weak – she’s driven by a constant desire to be thrown headlong into something new, to be awash in visceral pleasures before those pleasures inevitably settle down into the predictable patterns of domesticity. She’s like a child, in many ways, needing constant material stimulation, which is a massive break from Polley’s take on the character, in which Margot’s youthful yearning is portrayed more innocently, simply a realization one morning that life doesn’t have to be as safe as she’s allowed it to become, an awakening that she can’t shake even as it increasingly creates a wedge between her and her husband. That this hunger for more takes the form of a sighing romanticism, Williams seems to argue, isn’t because of any inherent innocence but because Margot knows the world will sympathize with sighing romanticism, and because sighing romanticism prevents her from having to look too hard at her own propensity for fakeness. Polley gives us a kind of sadness we can all relate to, which is fine until the movie becomes nearly mean-spirited at the end; Williams goes full Madame Bovary with the character, which makes the descent much more logical.
Shooting Down Alternative Theories Like the Joyless Goblin That I Am
“But what if the screenplay seems to stumble on purpose?” you may be thinking. “What if Sarah Polley is deliberately using these supposed mistakes in order to call our attention to the cracks in Margot’s façade?”
See, that’s what I wanted to think, too, so you should be proud that you think like me, except slower. I wanted to think that Margot as she appears on the page and Margot as rendered through Williams’ performance were more synced-up than I originally gave credit for, but there’s just too much bleurgh in the screenplay to bridge that gap. This isn’t a Michael Showalter movie, and not everything can be chalked up to ironic self-awareness. Some examples of the screenplay simply stumbling are:
– Not just obvious audio cues, but conflicting obvious audio cues. “Video Killed the Radio Star,” a song about being doomed by getting the very thing that you want, plays multiple times in the movie. That would be evidence enough of the film’s reach exceeding its grasp, but it gets weirder. The title of the movie is taken from a Leonard Cohen song (itself inspired by a poem) about seizing love in the context of death, and this song even plays during a late-film montage. So we have the movie mocking Margot for reaching too far in life (“Video Killed the Radio Star”) while also encouraging her to reach for love because life is fleeting (“Take This Waltz”). This isn’t challenging writing, it’s thematic incoherence.
– The most classic of Indie Film Things, the scene in which the characters openly discuss the themes of the story. Indie writers tend to be proud creatures, and want everyone to know their movies are based on ideas, man. So we get Geraldine just flatly talking about how life has a void in it and it can’t be filled no matter what, Margot and Daniel (in their first ever conversation!) talking about the fear of being trapped between moments in life, that scene were Margot relays her failure to calm a crying baby and concluding that sometimes you’re just sad, and so many more scenes of cringe-worthy bluntness. I just can’t reconcile a script having this many incongruities while also trusting it to be simultaneously blowing my mind with the subtlest characterization I’ve ever seen.
– In the opening sequence of the movie Margot is invited to take part in a stunt being acted out by Medieval cosplayers. The activity she is tasked with? Whipping a man charged with adultery. Get it because she herself will soon FARTS ENDLESS FARTS.
– Lou being a cookbook author who specializes in chicken. Get it? Because chicken is plain, like Lou, but you see he can prepare it in countless ways, which shows that unlike Margot Lou can constantly derive new pleasures from the simple things in life THE ENDLESS FARTS THEY CONTINUE HOW CAN I POSSIBLY BE THIS GASSY.
All of this points to the same conclusion: Polley wants to add some unease to the proceedings but is limited by hamstrung writing, and the likable Margot we see in the initial scenes of the movie is lost in the shuffle, as are the themes that originally guided her journey.
Conversely!
But this is where Williams is in her fucking element, man. I swear, it’s like she saw the same problem that the audience was going to see so she went to work making that shit plausible. It’s not dissimilar to another film of hers where she damn-near singlehandedly saves a clunky script (My Weekend with Marilyn) by capitalizing on weak writing to grant herself the space to move the character in bold, oftentimes unabashedly unlikable, directions. Examples!
Even during the opening scenes of the movie there are moments granted to us by Williams’ performance that intimate a Margot who might not be so, well, Margot, after all – the way in which she mocks Daniel with surprisingly adept cruelty, how she visits his apartment and seems so immediately at home in assessing his life, how she rubber bands between being almost suffocatingly close to Lou and accusing him of abandoning her emotionally, how her playful moments (like when she’s dancing to distract Lou when he’s on the phone) always have this neediness to them. None of these things can fairly be attributed to the script because they’re not explicit; they’re decisions of the performer, to lace what could be the gradual exposing of an ingenue to the real world with a performative quality that indicates this might all be part of her plan, after all, that she’s simply riding one wave of emotion with Lou while also keeping an eye on the horizon for a newer, better one.
Regardless of whether or not it was by choice or necessity Williams’ approach to the material bridges the gap between where Margot starts and where she finishes far better than Polley’s (hey, I wrote my way through difficult thoughts just like Freud used to do! Let’s all do some blow and ruminate about penises to celebrate!). It’s kind of a bummer that such an on-the-fly facelift was even necessary, because I liked the conflict as originally established just fine; the notion that you aren’t shackled to whatever life you’ve fallen into, even if the pulling of the band-aid can be rough, and watching a young woman start to appreciate the beauty of the unknown for the first time all struck me as solid goddamn components for a movie. But things just get so weirdly defeatist at the end, and Margot so increasingly erratic and unlikable, that Williams’ more-or-less retconning of the material was absolutely necessary, if not ideal. Maybe she didn’t spin hay into gold (at least in terms of the movie as a whole; her performance is fucking magical), but she did manage to turn it into some fine coils of copper. And that’s not nothing. Copper is a fine conductor with many practical applications!
The End
What a fucking downer! Margot goes full Madame Bovary and is sealed away in the mausoleum of her own toxic fantasy, the success of Lou’s cookbook is undercut by the whole getting divorced thing, Geraldine is back on the sauce, there’s a 100% chance that box full of chicks is getting dumped in the trash, and where is Little Portugal going to find another rickshaw driver on such short notice? Nobody looks good in this.
But really, all those pieces I just mentioned are mostly scattered incoherently about the movie’s back half, united by little more than their shared categorization of Challenging Things That Happen in Indie Movies, Regardless of Context. It’s on the strength of the actors that things hold together at all, and that the promise of the film’s opening scenes is fulfilled at least somewhat.
But no one deserves more credit than Michelle Williams for breathing life time and time again into a rapidly deteriorating screenplay. As the conceit gets clunkier and less coherent her plumbing of the character’s psyche and weaknesses and her capacity to pass off multiplying gaps in storytelling logic as purposeful hints of darker portent become increasingly virtuosic, until we reach the point where, while it’s a bummer that we don’t get to see what happens to the Margot introduced in the beginning of the movie, the Margot that Williams pivots to instead is fascinating in her own right and destined for an even worse fall.
Perhaps this is the beginning of a series on Ms. Williams and her inimitable role as the Screenplay Whisperer? A kind of dual-purpose series in which we celebrate one of the great actors of her generation, while also asking the question what is a story, and how is it told? Actually, fuck that, every movie she’s ever been in besides Dick and The Baxter is depressing as fuck. Let’s do MacGruber next! He fucks a ghost in that one!
MacGruber! MacGruber! MacGruber!