Take This Waltz

Director: Sarah Polley
Year Released: 2011
Rating: 1.5

The unhappy wife (Michelle Williams) of a chicken cook (Seth Rogan) is seduced by a creepy, too-persistent artist/rickshaw puller (Luke Kirby) - at first she tries juggling both (without fornicating with the "artist") before eventually leaving her husband. Polley the filmmaker isn't quite up to the standards of Polley the actress - the dialogue in this is sometimes laughably terrible, plus it's challenging to try to find any kind of sympathy or even interest in Williams' egocentric jerk character and the complexities of her troubled inner world - that would lead her to betray her too-kind, too-tolerant husband - are hardly probed. There's a stylishly intriguing section near the end in which Polley swoops her camera around a loft to suggest the passage of time ... but it feels like it's from a different movie, and the shower scene - with struggling alcoholic Sarah Silverman (looking mighty fine sans clothes) - spells out the movie's (singular, obvious) message well before the movie's over and plays itself out: everything new gets old eventually.