Take This Waltz (2011)

IMDb plot summary: A happily married woman falls for the artist who lives across the street.
Directed by Sarah Polley. Starring Michelle Williams, Seth Rogen, Luke Kirby, and Sarah Silverman.

(Spoilers ahead about the end of the movie.)

I feel like this one is going to take me awhile to process, so rather than try to write a thematically coherent and concise review, here are a series of thoughts:

-This movie HURT to watch. Like... almost physically. I connected in a really, really strong sense with Seth Rogen's character and wanted everything to be OK for him and it kind of broke me when it wasn't.

-I can't decide whether I loved or hated Michelle Williams in this. I suspect my final thoughts will be that she did an excellent job playing a very immature and largely unlikable character. In a sense, I think she may have captured what a Manic Pixie Dream Girl would be in actual real life, not a rom com...

-"Life has a gap in it, it just does. You don't go crazy trying to fill it like some lunatic." I wrote down this quote when it was said because I feel like that's the key to the movie. It made me think of this flick in relation to Midnight in Paris or Vicky Cristina Barcelona, two other movies where characters haphazardly chase a fantasy to escape discontentment.

-I wanted to punch whatshisname (the neighbor she falls in love with) in the face.

I haven't yet really put all these thoughts together, and as I write this review I'm still kind of... emotionally reeling from it. Putting my thoughts down has, however, helped to solidify a little bit that I do think this was an excellent movie, although I'm not sure it's one I could ever watch again.

4 stars.

Flickchart: #431 out of 2110, below The Pirates of Penzance and above The Basketball Diaries.