“Life has a gap in it. It just does. You don’t go crazy trying to fill it like some lunatic.”

Anthony’s rating: Sweet, tender, funny, and still hard to watch. In other words, very good.

Anthony’s review: I don’t think Sarah Polley will ever be a financially successful mainstream filmmaker. And I don’t think I want her to be. Her debut feature Away From Her was a beautiful slice of human drama, a soap-operatic love story treated with honesty and humanity. For that is the essence of an independent movie (not counting those directors for whom the indie scene was either a way to be hip or a backdoor “in”) — a completely human story. Many will say Take This Waltz feels more like a first film for Polley, but I say it feels like a Sarah Polley film. Beautiful yet uncomfortable, predictable yet surprising, painfully honest yet visibly hopeful.

Michelle Williams plays desperate Canadian housewife Margo who tries to navigate the thin, uncomfortable line between grown-up resignation and child-like exuberant passion. But try as she may, no matter how much of a nice guy her husband is (played by a surprisingly restrained Seth Rogen), she is visibly suffocated by the routine of her quiet, regular life. Her chance meeting with buff new neighbour Daniel (fellow Canuck Luke Kirby, for his best work check out the first season to Sling & Arrows), an artist with a similar passion for his outlook on life, will put her on the cutting edge of a choice to make.

Polley’s many visual metaphors, though in no way very subtle, are nevertheless powerful and emotionally engaging. Take, for example, the scene of a shared carnival ride that goes from cute to awkward to wild fun before ending abruptly in emptiness and silence.

The film presents us a love story in its entire honesty, one we all know by heart from our own every day lives but which we try to escape by watching movies about fairy-tale love. For this love story is not about two soul mates who meet, but about trying to live a life of passion without paying the price.

“I like shiny new things,” says one of Margo’s friends in a shower scene where she and two other “firm” ladies are shown next to their elders sporting bodies which sustained the ravages of time. “New things are what old things used to be,” replies a comfortably-naked Sarah Silverman.

And that is the essence of the plot twist pulled on us by the storyteller: Nothing truly ever lasts, and all that remains are the choices you make. For in the end, a love story this is not, but one about life as we truly live it. None of these characters are truly likeable, yet none of them can be despised even if we want to. Life, as we know it.

Bottom line, Sarah Polley’s strength as an independent filmmaker is being upheld with Take This Waltz, offering a simple and not overly original story and making it something equally sweet and heartbreaking that is impossible to resist, unless your preferences are more directed towards Michael Bay’s brand of non-cognitive entertainment. In that case stay away, and I mean hazmat-suit precaution with this puppy.

Intermission!

• THE most unromantic way to induce sexual intercourse. Has to be seen to be understood.
• Seth Rogen playing a cook who’s writing a chicken recipes book is not something I had on my cinematic Bingo card.
• What kind of mad physique must you have to to pull a rickshaw on Canadian roads? I can’t climb one flight of stairs without dying from a massive coronary! I died four times yesterday alone!
• The only time I ever liked Sarah Silverman, and I’m including Wreck-it Ralph. THAT is the power of a Canadian director!
• I get he wants to make a life-long recurring joke to his wife, but pouring a bucket of cold-water on her when she showers is a good way to get aggressively castrated in MY household.
• Raise your hands if just watching those tossing and turning park rides make you upchuck! No one? Just me? Bueller?!
• From bored housewife to Christmas-time threesome is an interesting journey.
• That ending is one hell of a gut punch. I love you Sarah, but f-k you for filming my feelings.