Script of the Week: Take This Waltz by Sarah Polley
There are stories that you read and you like and there are stories that you like so much that they stick with you over many years, sometimes even forever if you’re lucky. Take This Waltz by Sarah Polley is a story I have thought about countless times over the course of the last year.
Take This Waltz follows Margot. A twentysomething writer who has been married for five years and is flirting with the idea of having an affair. Margot however is afraid, afraid of being afraid to be precise. She is sensitive and a bit naive. She understands the paralyzing effect of fear and has become so terrified of the prospect of being stuck by fear, that she is stuck.
Margot can make no decisions; not about love, life, or her career. What she does well is make excuses and has plenty of reasons for not doing all of the things she yearns to do… love, live, write. By the end, the reader discovers what they already know. This yearning that Margot feels is simply life taking its course. Everything that once was young must turn old. The boyfriend who becomes husband, the body that sags, the mind that forgets. What we learn is that once this yearning to replace that which doesn’t satisfy us as it used to is fulfilled, it is replaced by a new yearning. The question becomes, when do we accept this? Like the character of Geraldine explains to Margot “In the big picture. Life has a gap in it Margot. It just does. You don’t go fucking crazy and try to fill it like some lunatic.”
Or don’t you?
I feel kinship to Margot. But the screenplay succeeds not only because of its main character, it succeeds because it is utterly ordinary. It sounds and feels like life. The characters are not characters in a movie, they are me, colliding with the fact of being alive. It’s a beautiful thing.
Trailer:
Sometimes a Good Notion 