Take This Waltz - one screening only, Thursday at MMoCA
Post by Sean Weitner on 10/2/2012 1:20pm
For much of its running time Take This Waltz is a surprisingly touching and rigorous infidelity drama.
Once you bear with some over-cranked meet-cute dialogue in its first 15 minutes, the movie settles into the sweet and sad process by which Margo (Michelle Williams) puts her happy five-year marriage to cookbook writer Lou (Seth Rogen) on the scales opposite her thrumming ardor for her neighbor, starving artist-cum-rickshaw cabbie Daniel (Luke Kirby).
The question of "will she?" is not a fait accompli: Daniel trips all of Margo's lust triggers and is a master of sensitive-guy questions, but Lou is a font of goofy companionability, a playful and supportive partner despite the fact that he and Margo easily lapse into the bickering of committed couplehood.
The best part of the movie proceeds in this vein as Margo goes on allegedly chaste quasi-dates with Daniel around a crayon-hued Toronto (which has never looked better onscreen), then goes home to Lou aching to feel something. This lets Williams take full advantage of her bruised-peach demeanor, the way her face can go in two seconds from neutral to smiling by way of almost sobbing. Margo is a portrait of self-consciousness that unselfconsciously alternates between halting and strutting, and Williams gets more out of closed lids and a half-retracted gesture than many actors can achieve with their best puppy dog eyes.
Speaking of puppy dogs, Rogen and Kirby are merely fine, able counterparts in their scenes with Williams but blanched by being grab bags of convenient male traits more than characters (by contrast, in only four scenes Sarah Silverman turns in a fully sketched performance as Lou's alcoholic sister).
Writer/director Sarah Polley foreshadows her true ambition, however, when Margo tells Daniel her fantasy of going with him (wink wink nudge nudge) to the lighthouse. The last act expands on that staked claim: Polley wants to contribute something to the feminist canon, a common-cause attagirl for women who've come to feel they're in the wrong marriages.
The problem is that the movie seems to only be able to advance this concept by eventually undercutting the idea that Margo and Lou were ever happy. Rogen makes Lou chummy and warm, but in the clutch Polley sells him short, depriving him of qualities anyone would regard as critical, such as an interest in carrying on dinner conversation. Likewise, Margo’s prospective relationship with Daniel is as explicitly carnal as it can be while still being technically chaste, and so reducing Margo and Lou's conjugal bliss to a one-second shot of preparatory under-the-covers pajama-shucking stacks the deck. Near the end, Margo's baby-voiced "I wuv you" is contrasted with a huskily whispered "I love you," a signal that Lou and Margo's cutesy manner -- the surest thing those two have, and which Polley had earlier privileged -- is, in fact, infantilizing her, keeping her from fully entering womanhood.
This all shifts the movie's thrust from "Should Margo leave a happy marriage?" to "Should Margo stay in a stifling marriage?" That's a much less gripping question, and as Polley turns her attention toward it, she revises away the tension that made Margo's plight so screenworthy. Even viewed through the lens of "Margo’s awakening" rather than "Team Lou vs. Team Daniel," the movie suffers every time Lou’s behavior lowers the cost of that awakening.
The bookend sequences downplay the idea of happy endings in favor of dramatizing Silverman's proclamation that "life has a gap in it" -- delivered with the gravitas of one who knows -- and in so doing Take This Waltz respects its subject. But for all this lovely movie does right, it takes an easy way out when a more challenging spirit -- one that made the husband more empathetic, or that cast Rogen as a silly paramour and the conventionally hunky Kirby as a stolid spouse -- might have made it exceptional.
Take This Waltz plays at 7 p.m. on Thursday, October 4, as part of the Madison Museum of Contemporary Art's Spotlight Cinema series.
That was 15 years ago, I went
Submitted by coach factorysasa on Fri, 2012-10-26 04:43.
That was 15 years ago, I went to the city on business, leaving coach outlet online the subject of business, I go to the mall to buy some gifts to colleagues. Usually, when I go shopping like to carry some coins, because the mall near sometimes begging people to twelve coins in my heart will ease some. This day as well, still some coins in the pocket, coach factory outlet so I will give a coach outlet store bunch of little beggars begging ten a few coins scattered. Just then, I saw a boy holding a sign high and looked at me, no doubt, that he would like to get my attention. I went to him in the past, to see his girl of coach purses outlet thirteen-year-old, poorly dressed very clean, hair combed neatly. He is not like the others hands take a Tang Cigang, his brand side painted with a boy in a shoe, the side that says - "I want a shoeshine box.
I was doing investment business, anyway, there is still time, I asked the boys how much money is needed, the boy said: "125."
I shook my head, and said he wants the shoeshine box is too expensive. Boy say no more expensive, also said he has been to four wholesale markets, have seen, want to buy a dedicated box, stool, good clean oil, good soft brush, the dozen shoe polish, to reach 125 yuan his request. Boy, speaking in tongues, right rhythmic.
I asked him how much money is now in the hands, the boy imagined, said to have 35 yuan, 90 yuan less also. I have carefully looked at the boy, determined he was not a little liar, then took out his wallet, took out 90 yuan, said: "90 dollars to you, be my investment. Condition, took the money from you this moment, we are a partner. I stay for five days in the city within five coach factory online days, you should not only gave me 90 dollars, I would also like to have a dollar of interest if you promise this condition, 90 yuan is now owned by you. "
The boy excitedly looked at me Mankoudaying the. The boy also told me that he read the sixth grade, every week only to go on three days lessons, other days to cattle, sheep, help mothers farming, his results did not slide down over the top three, so he Best. I asked him why they buy the shoeshine box, he said that the family was poor, and he wants to take advantage of the summer and save enough tuition.
I looked at the boy in an appreciation of the psychological, then take him to the wholesale market to buy a shoe shine boxes and various other shoeshine appliances. Boy carrying a box, ready to be placed under the stall at the mall entrance. I shook my head and said, as his partner, in order to recover their costs, and the obligation to remind him to choose the place of business. Mall within the free shoe shine, a lot of people know. Boy seriously thought, asked: "election in the hotel opposite how?" I thought, here is a tourist city, a car a car every day to live in the hotel, they traveled the next day to travel definitely need shoes polished. Think of these, I promised him.
So the boy settled in the vicinity of the coach outlet hotel entrance, his shoeshine box into a little farther away from the door, he see no one around and said to me: "Why do not I paid a dollar interest? You should know my level of service. "Puchi" laugh, this little guy was witty, he is going to give me Shoe of which $'s interest with shoeshine charges arrived. I appreciate his shrewd, they sit him on the bench, said: "if you polished bad to prove that you're lying, my investment to a dishonest person to prove my investment failed." The boy's head Akira like a rattle, says he is the best, and his shoeshine training practice at home for a month. You know, not many people in rural areas and a few pairs of good shoes, he is the one to let them shoes out, carefully wipe polished.
A few minutes later, looking at the shoes light can Kam people, I nodded with satisfaction. Out of coach outlet store your pocket red pen, wrote the two characters in his left and right cheek: "Best" boy music. Just then, a minibus car with a car over visitors, he quickly carrying a shoeshine box ran over and pointed to his face after another to get off the travelers, said: "This is my reward customer, you want to try? your shoes I would become a mirror. "In this way, the boys busy ...
The next day, I came to the hotel to see the boy early to keep stalls, he excitedly told me yesterday he earned 50 dollars removing me 18 yuan, dinner spend three, his net surplus of 29 yuan. I patted him on the head, and bless him for good. He said that last night, did not sleep Bridge, but sleep Chase Shop, but did not pay 5 dollars bunk money, I doubt how beds will not pay money? In this case, the boy smiled smugly: "I help the boss and the boss rub a dozen pairs of shoes, tonight, I also do not have money to stay."
Five days passed quickly, I want to leave this city, and five days, the boy also 18 yuan, also enough 90 yuan. The boys know that I coach factory outlet online am louis vuitton purses the manager of an investment company in Beijing, said to be and so he graduated from university, will go to Beijing to look for me, saying, he stretched out a small black hand, I have also lent a hand, the two stingy clenched together ......
Stroke, was actually 15 years.
I left the original investment in the company, he opened a trading company. This day, I'm the office boggling, because of the unexpected loss of a large number of goods, working capital is facing difficulties, the Quartet in debt payment. Just put down the phone, the secretary came in and said there was a young man of cheap coach purses about my lunch, I asked who Touyebutai, secretary to come up with a key chain, put on my desk, looking at this key chain, and I froze lived, that the above is a glass Winnie, Winnie the coach factory forehead engraved on three words: "I am the best".
I think of it, this key chain, stuffed into his palm gift 15 years ago I Shoe juvenile parting handshake.
By noon, I walked into the hotel, book a good seat stood up in suits and ties, the young people of the British Gas is pressing. His subtle smile, slightly curved waist towards me. From his face, I found little then shadow Shoe young. Tea, he took out a five million check, said: "I want to invest in your company, the profits arrived back within five years."
5 million, it is timely help!
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