Her husband is Lou (Seth Rogen), played with that shaggy likability that allows Rogen to charm the pants off a film. Lou is not, alas, a passionate man, and his wife spends much time basking in the warm glow of the window of an oven door, while thinking pensively about how he could be preoccupied with chicken while married to such an adorable creature.
She is not lacking for adoration, however. Even before we meet Lou, she has met Daniel (Luke Kirby) while doing a story in Nova Scotia. Wouldn't you know they're seated next to each other on the flight home? He calls her bluff when she's helped aboard in a wheelchair; she claims her legs are unreliable, and then confesses she asks for wheelchairs because she has panic attacks when making airport connections. This problem is a tad too precious for a healthy girl still in her 20s.
Talk about your Meet Cutes. Not only is Daniel seated next to her, but when they share a taxi to the same neighborhood, they discover they live across the street from each other. How does Daniel make the money to afford this neighborhood? He is an artist who supports himself by pulling a rickshaw through tourist areas. Yes. In Toronto, that is surely a seasonal job.
There is a point here when "Take This Waltz" seems to be veering precariously toward the magic realism of Wes Anderson, but Sarah Polley as an actress ("The Sweet Hereafter") and filmmaker ("Away from Her") has a grounding in realism. There is a lot of truth in this portrait of a marriage running out of the will to survive.
Daniel, it must be said, is an expert seducer. His method is exquisitely slow and subtle, and much of the erotic tension comes from the way that Margot and Daniel both know exactly what he's up to. While Lou stirs his chicken tetrazzini in blissful absorption, they have a way of meeting here and there for non-dates that look a lot like dates, including an underwater ballet in a neighborhood pool and shared martinis during which he performs verbal foreplay that's all the more exciting because most movies never have time for foreplay at all.
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