If films could think, and feel, (and there are people who think they can, and do), then Take This Waltz would be.. afraid of fear. The lead character, Margot, says this is what afflicts her at airports, which is why she’s taken on board in a wheelchair. She says it to Daniel, a man the film, and maybe Margot, has dreamt up and made out of boiler-plate Hollywood man-totty putty. Improbably, he’s sitting beside her on the plane, having just – or in the previous scene – encouraged her to mock-lash an adulterer – a pretend adulterer – in an historical theme park.
I don’t see much contemporary cinema, so I thought Daniel was played by Seth Rogen; it turns out he was the lumpier puttied totty Lou, married to Margot. Margot was played by Michelle Williams-as-Renee-Zellwegger. But all this ‘played by’ stuff belies the film’s biggest lie: it’s a ludicrously scripted and preposterously plotted piece of work, and therein maybe lies its salvation, or saving interest: layers of fantasy, starting with the one that the people, the places and situations they’re in, bear any relation to a known, human reality.
Afraid of fear. That’s the problem. The film’s premiss relies on the risk of Margot giving up the too-comfortable marriage in favour of the riskier fling. But the problem is, when she goes ahead, no-one gets hurt. There’s no real jeopardy. Lou says ‘funny thing is I’m kind of OK’ when Margot is jolted back to sort-of-reality by her sister-in-law falling off the wagon. Drunk driving down the street, the worst Geraldine does is trash a trashcan, as if the film is scared of a real scene.
But there are a few moments of authenticity, jarring with the fantasy-safety of most of the film (the opposite I think of what Phillip French said in the Observer): the scene in the women’s showers, 6 naked women, of all shapes and sizes, dowsing Margot’s ardour with lessons from life; and another dowsing, from Lou, who plans a lifelong joke then has to reveal it, about a faulty shower faucet. And an arresting closing shot, of Margot on a waltzer, spinning through the full chromatic range of disco and fairground lights, not knowing what kind of relationship, or life, or film she’s been caught up in for these past two hours…
Mitchell Reids in America 