Title: Take This Waltz

Opens: June 29, 2012

A recent book on happiness notes that, surprisingly, people 65 to 75 are among the happiest while those in their 20’s are not. This goes against what we see in the movies: young people having great parties (“Project X,” (“American Reunion”) and what we see in reality (young people meeting for brunch, having great parties). Even Sarah Polley’s new, sophomore feature, “Take This Waltz,” gives the impression that folks in their late twenties are having the time of their lives and, in contrast to the view that senior citizens are happiest, Polley’s first feature, “Away From Her,” introduces us to a sad man whose elderly, Alzheimer-afflicted wife, transfers her affection to someone in the nursing home.

“Take This Waltz” similarly features a person whose spouse transfers her affection to another, but in this case the principals are some fifty years younger than those in “Take This Waltz.” This is a quirky movie with people saying cute things to one another, but the cuteness can wear an audience down just as it does in another quirky picture, “Damsels in Distress.” The latter had the good sense to meander on for well under two hours

Polley’s featured player, Michelle Williams, take on the role of a 28-year-old Margot, living with her husband Lou (Seth Rogen). Lou is a successful cook and writer of books on how to prepare chicken. He is fulfilled. Margot is not: she is a writer who has not written much. Further, Margot, though seeming to love her husband of five years (the two frequently tease with sadistic thoughts of what they’d like to do to each other) but they seem more than content. After five years of marriage added to perhaps a year or two of dating, one doesn’t expect fireworks to go off whenever their eyes meet. But when sexual tension did rear its lovely head when Margo meets Daniel (Luke Kirby), lives are not the same.

Margot is already full of neuroses, afraid of being “in the middle” of things, but she’s smack in the middle when she falls for her next door neighbor Daniel, whom she sat next to on a flight from Montreal to their home in Toronto. Despite the fun parties that Margot enjoys with her husband and their friends, who include comedian Sarah Silverman in the role of her sister-in-law Geraldine–a recovering alcoholic who does unfunny stand-up comedy at one of the parties.

Among the odd items that Polley throws into the mix is a swimming exercise class presided over by an effeminate instructor who orders everyone out of the water when Margot pees, her urine turning the water around her a deep blue. That’s not all: when the women in the class, of various ages and sizes, take a shower, Polley shows them in full frontal and back nudity, and some of these women are not a pretty sight. What’s with the gratuitous birthday suits? Is this supposed to show that the director is trying to do something original, however gross?

Among the unbelievable points is that lover-boy Daniel has moved out of his crummy house into a huge, exquisitely designed and decorated loft—on the salary of a rickshaw driver? Michelle Williams is in virtually every frame but Seth Rogen comes out best in a role that shows him to be serious when he has to be, nor does he doesn’t hold back on the comedy. The movie’s title comes from a Leonard Cohen song, which Cohen interpreted from “Little Viennese Waltz” by Federico García Lorca.

Unrated. 116 minutes. © 2012 by Harvey Karten, Member, New York Film Critics Online

Overall – C+