We watched Take This Waltz last night. Fairly good movie. Michelle Williams is an amazing actress. Lots of serious stuff mixed in with goofy things. (E.g., using Video Killed the Radio Startwice.) But it left us a bit confused.
Margot doesn’t like being “in between”. So she faked needing a wheelchair so that the airline would help her between flights. Several other references to that.
But she seemed to enjoy the “in between” of flirting with Daniel. Not happy with just Lou. Not happy with just Daniel. (It appears.) But quite happy with the overlapping time. (Not counting the final breakup with Lou.)
I could see why she wouldn’t be happy with Lou. The guy preferred joking around to having sex. (And with Michelle Williams of all people. What is wrong with this guy?)
Not sure why she wasn’t happy with Daniel since they just montaged thru their stuff in the final part of the film. (Which wrapped around to the scene at the beginning.) Regular sex, then threesomes, then watching TV, then riding the Scrambler alone.
If it was just a straight tale of a woman who was bored, ran off with another guy and then found that to be boring, then okay. The conversation in the shower highlighted that.
But Margot explicitly doesn’t fit that persona. It seems her persona didn’t really come thru at all. What is going on with her?
(And I’m not even going to get into how a rickshaw driver could possibly afford those two places.)
This was such an odd movie. I really disliked how infantilized Margot was, and Daniel was so firm-minded in pursuing her that it made the whole thing seem creepy. Like a college senior chasing after a seventh-grader. I do think that we were supposed to see Margot as someone who’s naturally restless, but like you said, the character wasn’t developed enough to make her choices make sense.
I think the movie was about Margot’s emotional immaturity - rather than doing the hard yards required to work through the issues in her relationship, she jumped ship. But that was not a solution, as the movie depicted. The same issues cropped up in her next relationship - which is why the last scene in the movie was of her having fun on her own. She needed to learn to be happy with herself, rather than relying on her relationships to make her happy.
I think that Sarah Polley was using the movie to explore the reality of relationships - they are tough, and require a level of courage and emotional maturity to keep growing.
I liked this film. The problem was that Margot wasn’t supposed to be an especially likeable character but Michell Williams is just so darn adorable it was hard not to like her. Sarah Silverman’s character hit it on the head when she told Margot that there’s a hole in life and you don’t go crazy trying to fill it.
I agree that both the rickshaw driver and Margot and her husband seemed to be living beyond their means, but I let that slide assuming there was untold backstory about where their money was coming from. I’d rather see those fanciful digs than more realistic living conditions.