"It’s just this dance. It’s not forever. It’s going to change": A conversation with Sarah Polley

Named after Leonard Cohen’s exquisite homage to the poet Federico García Lorca, Sarah Polley’s Take This Waltz, the acclaimed actress’ second feature as writer/director, is in many regards the inverse of Away From Her, her debut, trading wintry places and care facilities for sweltering summer heat and urban cafés, somber earth tones for shimmering drunken fruit punch hues, a couple in their 60s and married for decades for one in their 20s and only just slipping into those first years of familiarity (and, perhaps, stagnation). Both films are equally distinguished by Polley’s preternatural insight into the nature of trust, lust, dependency, secrets, and the thorny complications of long-term love. It’s been noted that the events chronicled in Take This Waltz, which is basically a love triangle, mirror events in Polley’s own life. This may be the case, yet the result is hardly a mushy confession; lived experience only texturizes and at times actually lightens (unbearably) the film’s unnerving truthiness. For all the right reasons it is probably not a good date movie.

Which isn’t to say that Take This Waltz isn’t problematic in its execution. Michelle Williams’ Margot, a married copywriter drawn to another man, is captivating, a sponge. Her every hesitation brims with wildly varied urges; we never lose track of where she is emotionally. Yet her scenes with Luke Kirby, the artist and rickshaw driver she falls for, lack chemistry, their first exchanges feel especially forced, while those with Seth Rogen, so endearing and sympathetic as her husband, an author of cookbooks containing recipes for nothing but chicken (read: comfort food embodied!), are intermittently undone by Polley’s determination to impose a sense of well-developed intimacy. (Though there is something rather ingenious about the couple’s ritual of whispering sweet nothings to each other that sassily describe torture and murder.)  

Still, I can’t emphasize this enough: no matter how many reservations or accusations of bum notes one can lob at Take This Waltz it is nonetheless decidedly adult, wordlessly articulate, sexy, sweet, brutal and very much alive—an extraordinary film about the vagaries of desire, which is to say, something extremely rare. The last act in particular, which is both the fulfillment of a promise and the exhaustion of a longing, is haunting and brilliant in its conclusions. (Or lack there of.) I admire this film far more than I do many others that have far fewer flaws. Also: it is a heartfelt, if geographically confused, love letter to Toronto.

I was late for my interview with Polley at Toronto’s Gladstone Hotel. My flight was delayed and my taxi stuck in late afternoon traffic, but Polley waited for me. I was flustered; she was gracious, relaxed and responsive: an ideal interviewee. We spoke only a short while yet I think we managed to cover a great deal.

JB: Did you have a lot of ideas after Away From Her? Was it difficult to decide which idea to run with?

Sarah Polley: There were several things I’d started. This was the one I was enjoying the most. It felt like the one I could learn most from as a filmmaker. It would allow me more freedom to explore with the camera and the actors than I’d had on Away From Her. A second film feels like an opportunity to do what you really want to do, as opposed to what you think you should do.

JB: Films about romance often focus on how the lovers are meant to be together. So they’re to some degree about destiny. But Take This Waltz is very much about desire. Desire is a central character, a foil, something greater than the individuals.

SP: I wanted to explore the theme of life having a gap in it. Of emptiness. Of the way we use desire to fill that gap. I wanted to envelop the audience in that feeling of the beginning of desire, when the world’s popping in Technicolor and everything seems new and brimming with possibility—the possibility of reinventing yourself. From there we can follow desire through its natural life cycle and see what happens.

JB: I found your exploration of those feelings very resonant, very real, but I also sensed a very deliberate use of artifice, the punched up colours, or the idea that the object of one’s desire, though found in another city, might live right across the street.

SP: I definitely wanted the world to feel believable but then at moments have this fairy tale quality. This extends to the depiction of Toronto. That’s Toronto in the movie, but it’s also a somewhat idealized Toronto. I romanticize the city. It doesn’t actually look the way I see it. I wanted it to be a little too vibrant, a little too colourful. I didn’t want to be shy about injecting moments with coincidence or magic, of having a dance happen in the middle of a very messy human story.

JB: At what point did the Leonard Cohen song come to you?

SP: Right at the beginning. I was listening to it so often. There’s something about its circular nature. I found it so beautiful and romantic and sad. I wanted the film to capture that same tone.

JB: It’s a song I adore. I almost find it hard to listen to. One of the things I love about it is that it feels particularly unresolved, partly because of the waltz time, partly because the lyrics whisk us through these baroque scenarios yet never seem to land anywhere.

SP: Exactly. It almost feels like it could go forever. The song kind of tangles itself up in the same way that I like to imagine the characters do with each other.

JB: I think of how both the song and the film end, with this idea that the waltz is “all that there is.” Being in motion, being between things. We leave Margot feeling like she’s still between things.

SP: Absolutely. Perhaps she’s a little more at ease with being between things, but that feeling of emptiness has followed her. And there’s something about the title: ‘Take This Waltz.’ It’s just this dance. It’s not forever. It’s going to change, to mutate. But you go with it anyway because those are some of the greatest moments in life, when you just go with somebody, surrender.

JB: I was also fascinated by your repeated use of ‘Video Killed the Radio Star.’ Is it me, or does this very different song not allude to the film’s most devastating piece of subtext?

SP: Absolutely. To me that song addresses what the film is about completely. One thing replaces another, but it’s not necessarily better, and it too will be temporary.

JB: This sense of being caught between things works its way into several aspects of the film. Being a recovering alcoholic, like Sarah Silverman’s character, means that you’re sort of always between drinks. Margot and Lou’s home seems perpetually between renovations.

SP: Matthew Davies, the production designer, was responsible for a lot of that. He really made that house feel like something in progress. You could see the layers of different families who’d lived there. He also brought a lot of the heat to the film. He made those rooms feel sweaty. There’s always a sheen in the paint or a shiny wallpaper. Every material he put in that house exudes heat. But yes, our discomfort with feeling between things was something I wanted to film to embody. Everybody was playing with that, including Lea Carlson, our wardrobe designer. She would sometimes dress Margot like an adolescent, as though she’s still going through this in-between phase.

JB: One thing about being an artist that some people find hard to fathom is the fact that your whole career keeps you between things. Most of your time is spent between one project and the next. Is that something that gives you anxiety?

SP: Professionally, I love being between things. I don’t love it in the rest of my life. Being between things professionally means you’re always trying to make things happen, but during those gaps you don’t always have to be doing it, which is also great. I love making films, but I also love just thinking about making films. And I love sleeping through the night, which you’re generally not able to do when you’re making a film.

JB: Are you at all interested in directing yourself as an actor?

SP: I don’t think so. Not unless I get way better as a director and way better as an actor. I’m so amazed that anyone can do both things simultaneously. Maybe one day I’ll try it, though I worry it could be miserable. I enjoy directing and acting so much, but I feel like doing them at the same time would compromise both experiences.

JB: I ask because I’m every now and then struck by how certain actors wind up doing their best work when directing themselves. Off the top of my head, I think of, let’s say, Clint Eastwood or John Cassavetes as actors who might be best when directing themselves.

SP: Now that’s actually inspiring. I never considered that. As you said that I suddenly had this flash of what it might be like to do exactly what you want to do and not have to worry about someone else’s opinion. That could actually be really fun.

JB: Perhaps if it was a very low-stakes project with a small crew, something you could take a lot of time with.

SP: Ooh. I love that idea. It’s weird. That’s the first time that’s ever sounded attractive to me. The idea of feeling less inhibited, not trying to please anybody. 

JB: Alright, then. Now I want to see Sarah Polley direct Sarah Polley.

SP: [Laughs] I’ll have to think about it. 

Monster's mall: Observe and Report

The first fat white man is glimpsed scampering across the vastness of the mall parking lot. He wears only a trench coat. We don’t see his face. He flashes his flabby nakedness to all available female victims. “Hey bitch!” “I’m gonna fuck you!” “See my dick!” His attacks are essentially verbal hit-and-runs, though the sight of his flapping ding-dong probably causes the more lasting trauma. The second fat white man is the mall’s self-designated head of security. Ronnie (Seth Rogen), delusional, bullying, gun-obsessed, bipolar, socially disabled, overly fond of jogging pants, and possessing violent impulses about ready to blow, is a potentially far greater threat to the general public, yet he is, in his small way, their protector. He’s the protagonist of Jody Hill’s Observe and Report.

The two fat white men are marked from the outset as opponents. In a sense they’re mirror images of one another, and as is usually the case in tales of döppelgangers, there’s only room for one. In this case, it’s the younger, weirdly charming one. He might make racially driven threats, get trigger happy with his Taser and beat the living shit out of adolescent skaters now and then, but he never goes around showing his johnson to the world, and that apparently makes all the difference.

With Ronnie’s fixation on an unattainable blonde (Anna Faris, quite brilliant in a frustraingly underdeveloped part), his messiah complex, and his voice-over—“The world doesn’t need another scared man…”—speaking to us over images of him working out, the model for this anti-hero is quite clearly Travis Bickle, and the notion of setting a blackly comic Taxi Driver in the sunny suburbs is an inspired one. The cast seems to be beautifully aligned in their ability to fuse the necessary bleakness and mania, and Hill’s immediately apparent knack for cutting out of a scene right on the crest of a comic-shock wave invites us to settle in for something special. But Observe and Report is sadly neither here nor there. Its dementia is all surface. It’s a tease of a movie that finally doesn’t even try to follow through on its promise to probe psychosis for comic payoffs.

Part of the problem is that the world of Observe and Report is one without consequence. Sometimes, for the sake of a solid but purely short-term gag, it allows to us to recognize Ronnie as a total nutcase living in a world of puerile fantasy. At other times, especially the ending, the movie surrenders itself to Ronnie’s fantasy and rewards his insanity, though strictly in the modest ways of the mainstream lovable loser comedy, which is precisely where Feris' character, who should have been as unpredictable as Rogen's, glaringly shows itself to be a missed opportunity. Going in either direction might have resulted in something compelling, disturbing or more consistently hilarious, but Hill tries to have it both ways, going for the schadenfreude and the sentimentality at once, and winds up making something essentially incoherent.

These movies stink: Rocknrolla, Zack and Miri Make a Porno

Rocka Rolla is the name of Judas Priest’s first album, released back in ’74, produced by the same guy who did the first three Sabbaths and the debut for Budgie. The driving title track—a romance narrative, featuring the encouraging refrain of “You can take her if you want her/If you think you can!”—has solid crank, a pleasingly inane octave switch in the guitar solo, and wilted harmonica accents that accentuate the overall sense of ambitious young lads still testing out various aural accoutrements to see whether they fortify the metal hammer. I mention Rocka Rolla here only because, while a modest work to be sure, it is so much better than Rocknrolla, the new Guy Ritchie movie with the strikingly similar yet, however implausibly, even stupider title.

Ritchie’s been working out his sub-Tarantino kooky crime shtick for a while now—it’s been a full decade since Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels—but age, practice and marriage to Madonna hasn’t made his movies any better. This time around, Ritchie’s motley crew is comprised of a couple of lower echelon crooks (Gerard Butler and Idris Elba); an overconfident mob boss (Tom Wilkinson) and his smarter, classier right-hand (Mark Strong, who also narrates for some reason); a foxy super accountant (Thandie Newton, not acting so much as modeling a collection of tear-away power suits as prelude to an astoundingly lifeless and pointless booty call); a junky rock star with father issues (Toby Kebbell, impressively emaciated, seemingly on the verge of death); and a Russian billionaire with a soft spot for high class prostitutes (Karel Roden).

Some are the slimy scumbags that try to screw everybody; others are just the regular scumbags that we’re supposed to like. Any sense of relationship between the characters is nonexistent. Come to think of it, any sense of character is nonexistent. The actors are asked only to prop up a tired old hag of a plot involving the usual web of cons, the pathetic pretexts for violence, the slow-mo and fast-mo, and the fussy montage sequences that resemble corporate training videos with huge budgets. There are attempts at conveying a gentler, more sensitive side, but the hero’s embracing of homosexuality only serves to exacerbate the boy’s club atmosphere, while the attention given to junky wisdom makes for a regrettable detour, with Kebbell delivering a monologue about the life lessons to be learned from a pack of smokes that’s a lot less profound than Forrest Gump and his metaphorical box of chocolates. In short, Ritchie seems to be on autopilot more than ever with Rocka Rolla—and he didn’t even have the decency to use Priest on the soundtrack!

“There ain’t no such thing as free titties.” The line, one of many throwaway faux-truisms on offer here, is spoken by Delaney (Craig Robinson), the first-time producer employed by the titular independent filmmakers of Zack and Miri Make a Porno, a man who offers to bankroll his destitute friends’ radical get-the-lights-back-on scheme primarily out of a burning desire to see breasts that aren’t dangling off his emasculating wife. He says the line during a crisis point in the movie, when the team’s dream of penetrating the porn market seems to be shattered following the unexpected—for them at least; for the audience it’ll seem right on cue—demolition of the old garage they’ve been using as a makeshift film studio.

Funny thing is, Delaney’s declaration seems pretty much on the nose. For all the potty-mouthed dialogue, gross-out gags, general licentiousness and rampant supporting role nudity gleefully strewn throughout Zack and Miri Make a Porno, this finally feels like a blithely puritanical tale, limpid, shackled to tired convention and extolling an emotionally juvenile foundation for love—no free titties, indeed. Whether or not Zack and Miri’s porn will ever pay off or even give some lonesome surfer a chub seems dubious and is of little concern in any event; what matters most here, what is crucial in Smith's moral universe, is that Miri doesn’t have sex with someone other than Zack because, implausible as it seems, this is actually the story of two lifelong friends and roomies who supposedly were always destined to become lovers, and—here comes the irony—just as they’re on the brink of being porn stars, ingrained, panic-driven monogamy rises up like an iceberg in their lives’ heretofore libertine sexual trajectory.

Maybe I should get to the point and let you know how obscenely lazy this movie is, yet another testament to the jack ass attitude-trumps-all approach of writer/director Kevin Smith, whose prolific oeuvre includes such overrated titles as Clerks, Mallrats, Dogma and Jersey Girl. Smith’s desire to shock, cajole or titillate seems far greater than his ability to develop character, tell a story with even a hint of originality, or genuinely articulate the unspoken, hopefully comical rage of the American suburban working class he’s appointed himself some sort of spokesman for. Of course, here I am talking about craft, imagination and style when we’re not supposed to give a shit, right? At least so long as we’re entertained, which, thanks only to Robinson and most especially the smart pairing of Seth Rogen and Elizabeth Banks, the actors playing Zack and Miri, we occasionally are. I guess Smith is in the business of making critic proof movies, which, if this latest effort is any indication, is another way of saying he doesn’t want to try very hard.

There’s doubtlessly a fun movie to be made from just spinning out all the inevitably humorous and even unconsciously insightful steps involved in turning a couple of everyday folks into pornographers, a sort of let’s-put-on-a-sex-show story. It’s all the more disappointing then that Smith, whose sense of humour is nothing if not frank, manages to get in so little of that bawdy comedy of recognition, though he does offer a few of the better porn movie titles I’ve heard in while, ie: A Cock and Lips Now. Everything is sidetracked by the half-assed When Hairy Met Dangly palsy romance that, for all the fun Rogen and Banks have here, is so lacking in chemistry as to be a joke in itself. Smith’s dogged adherence to the dopey, overworked rules of the romantic comedy is perplexing given that he could have had done so much more with a far simpler narrative than he has, while little spectacles like his truly sad “funny dancing” montage or his staging of the big token moments, such as Zack and Miri’s scene where they finally do it for the camcorder on a sack of coffee beans, is so incompetent as to prove the guy can’t even sell us a cheap cliché. At least porn queen Traci Lords shows up in a few scenes. There’s a certain pleasure to be had to seeing someone who actually knows how to do their job.