Take This Waltz (2011)

'Take This Waltz' is the second film directed by Canadian actress Sarah Polley, she wrote and produced it as well.

Michelle Williams is a freelance writer who meets Luke Kirby while on a work trip to Montreal, they end up seat mates on the return trip and even catch a cab together back from the airport. You see they live real close, across the street, each thought the other looked familiar. It's a meet cute, they like each other, complication is Michelle Williams is married.

Spoilers

Specifically Williams is married to Seth Rogan, a writer of cook books. They seems to have a happy marriage, but it has become routine, Williams finds Kirby exciting and over the course of the film he seduces her away from her husband. This isn't exactly what he set out to do, nor did Williams intend to seek fulfilment outside of her marriage. The relationship is not consummated until after Williams and Rogan seperate, but once that happens the new couple embark on a rather debuched time, including his and her threesomes, until that relationship too settles into a kind of routine; it still appears "healthy", but so did Williams and Rogan's.

The film has some flights of fancy, most of the action takes place in Toronto's "Little Portugal" neighborhood which is colorful and quirky looking. None of these characters should be able to live so well on their jobs, Kirby's character is literally a rickshaw driver. Aside from that and some things at the end the movie is very low key, it feels like it says some truthful things about relationships and how they drift apart. There is also a counterpoint story about Rogan's recovering alcoholic sister Sarah Silverman and her relationship with husband and daughter, and how they mostly make that work.

Roger Ebert said in his review of the film that the casting of the sympathetic Williams seemed a deliberate ploy so audiences would overlook just how awful her character can be, I think that is true, but if you keep that in mind as you watch it should make the performance even more impressive. This slightly hard to categorize indie can both reel you in and repell you, a strange accomplishment. ***