Take This Waltz (2011).
There is nothing particularly original about the plot of Sarah Polley's sophomore feature, Take This Waltz (2011). The film is about a woman in her late twenties, Margot (Michelle Williams), who is happily married to a great-guy-type, Lou (Seth Rogen), yet finds herself seduced and charmed by her neighbor Daniel (Luke Kirby). Lou, a cookbook author, is warm and bearish, while Daniel is lanky and caustic, a rickshaw driver with an artistic sensibility. Margot, a freelance writer, finds herself caught between safety and risk, a problem which has plagued the straight woman since time immemorial.
Almost halfway into the film, Margot and Daniel sit at a bar, talking over martinis. The light is golden and soft, blurring out the sharper edges of their transgression, emphasizing the dreamlike, slightly off-kilter nature of their encounter. In lieu of actually crossing the line, Margot and Daniel relegate their desires to the more abstract plane of conversation. Narrating is not technically cheating, and for about two whole minutes, prompted by Margot, Daniel narrates in minute detail a fantasy of what their eventual sexual encounter would be like. It's a robust narration, pushing past the viewer; midway through it, I started to feel like I shouldn't be listening in on this at all, that I had landed somewhere embarrassing and private: another person's wet dream.
For hours after revisiting Take This Waltz, I mulled over the problem of this sequence. It was either brilliant or misguided; a moment of real authorial vision or an overcompensation for the film's otherwise extremely benevolent tone. While something about it calls to mind the adolescent thrill of a good girl doing something bad, the monologue still retains a beautiful kind of longing, particularly in the way it highlights the intoxication of a private world accessible only to the two people living in it.
Take This Waltz is Sarah Polley through and through: it is emotionally rich, touchingly optimistic, and bathed in a warm, hopeful light reminiscent of early mornings. It is also at times corny and exceedingly self-conscious, bordering on saccharine. I concluded I liked the sex-talk sequence after all, even though I cringed watching it; if nothing else, it’s daring and playful, and it pushes the boundaries of its own story. It is a bold move for an otherwise timid film, and the contrast between these two tonal extremes gives it depth. As an artist, Polley puts a loving hand forward. She is forgiving, compassionate, and funny, almost maternal in her approach. This is where some of her work loses its strength: a loving mother can sometimes be suffocating.
***
Women Talking (2022).
Women Talking, Polley's latest film and this year’s Academy Award winner for Best Adapted Screenplay, inspired discourse from the moment it arrived. Billed, whether intentionally or not, as a #MeToo movie, the title alone announced the presence of a message. Polley herself has spoken about the function of the title: "It is throwing down the gauntlet," she said. "Are you really not going to see this movie because it's called 'Women Talking'?"
This defiant stance is of a piece with the story being told. The film shares its title with the Miriam Toews book it’s based on, which fictionalizes the horrific events that disturbed an isolated Mennonite colony in Bolivia in the mid-2000s. The women who live there—and girls as young as four years old—have been systematically drugged and sexually abused by the men in the middle of the night, often waking up to new injuries. They get together to take a vote and decide their fate: will they stay and fight, or will they leave? Forgive and forget is an option that is dismissed almost as soon as it is presented. What follows is a long debate about the nature and fairness of forgiveness; about how to move on from oppression and trauma, and how to organize a collective that operates justly in the interest of its members.
The stakes of the decision are, of course, extremely high—in fact, they are so self-explanatory that Polley stops developing them as soon as they are stated aloud. Because the resonance is built into the plot, the need to make a well-rounded, realized film seems almost to be put on the back burner. If emotionally affecting, the film had the potential to shock some much-needed life back into the hollow state of post-#MeToo conversation: having now been so long discussed, picked apart, defended, and attacked, the story could've been a welcome reminder of the real stakes of a feminism that works to liberate the collective rather than the individual, that finds its strength in numbers, and that understands women's emancipation as a struggle of life or death. Sadly, the film never does manage to transcend its own message or post-#MeToo discourse; instead, it seems to expect the viewer to just take its importance at face value, which flattens the story that follows. A sense of discovery is replaced by betting anticipation. As the opening credits roll up, we are already thinking about how it will or won't conform to expectations created by a number of epithets: a feminist reckoning, a post-#MeToo story, a story of resistance, women talking, women believing each other, so on and so forth.
Stories We Tell (2012).
Polley's filmography is marked by explicit thematic frameworks: the unreliability of memory, particularly, plays a central role in both her documentary Stories We Tell (2012) and her debut feature, Away from Her (2006). Those films not only transcend the message they strive to impart, but do so with a deft, subtle hand. Stories We Tell is Polley's most realized achievement: it is compassionate, funny, and loving without being saccharine; these qualities inform and strengthen her approach rather than stifle it. In that film, she investigates and questions the prevailing mythology of her family. Riddled with twists and turns, the story hinges on her discovery that she was a product of an affair her mother had while acting in a play in Montreal, which encourages her to find her biological father and reconsider her relationship with the father who raised her. Polley's awareness of the fact that only one side of the story can ever be told—her mother has long been deceased—becomes a starting point from which to piece together the person her mother was. To fill in some of the gaps left by her mother's absence, Polley casts actors to play her parents and other central characters in Super 8 footage that is revealed to be staged rather than found toward the end of the film.
In Stories We Tell, Polley probes her family history with a delicate touch, and manages to be explicit about the film's conceptual intentions without becoming too abstract. These intentions—a curiosity about how memories are made, interpreted, and passed down through generations—are vital to the project, but they never overwhelm the feeling of the story, the richness of the characters, and, finally, the connection the audience is able to forge with them. There are many versions of Michael, Polley's dad, in the documentary: he is a writer, an actor, a father who is at turns loving and neglectful, a passive husband and a devoted chronicler of his wife's life. Polley follows, too, the contradictions in the competing narratives told about her mother. When she asks her mother's friends and her siblings whether they thought that her mother, who suffered from cancer, knew she was dying—Polley herself, a child at the time, had no real grasp of the gravity of the disease—they say yes, but when she poses that same question to Michael, he suggests that she had "no real sense" of the impending tragedy, which confirms Polley's own interpretation. These responses stand quietly next to each other, encouraging the audience not to pick a side but contemplate the fragility of our interpretations of others—a move that only serves to emphasize the fullness and complexity of her mother's life.
As an auteur, this seems to be the unifying aspect of Polley's work: her goodwill toward flaw almost pushes credibility. Walking away from Stories We Tell, I was struck by the overwhelmingly tolerant nature of the Polley family; everyone gets along well and is able to laugh and forgive, which makes the narrative almost too neat. Almost: the people depicted have been caught in messy familial knots, but they’re willing to untangle them with honesty (in her recent book of essays, Run Towards the Danger: Confrontations with a Body of Memory, Polley writes obliquely about long-lasting disagreements that have distanced her from some of her siblings). I like this about Polley’s approach; the suggestion is that although we all make mistakes, a devotion to love and understanding might make all of this emotional debris easier to manage. Polley is able to distance herself enough from her family’s mythology such that her portrayal is nuanced and fair, while at the same time retaining the closeness to her loved ones that gives the film its emotional reach. As a thematic framework, the unreliability of memory expands the meaning of the story instead of constraining it, largely because Polley knows to let go of an anxious need to guide the audience toward one particular interpretation.
Away from Her (2006).
Polley's debut, Away from Her, based on a short story by Alice Munro, centers on a question: how much of ourselves do we lose when we lose our memories? Starring Julie Christie and Gordon Pinsent, the film is about the relationship between a long-married couple after one partner, Fiona (Christie), is diagnosed with Alzheimer's. Hosting a dinner party for neighbors shortly after being diagnosed, Fiona temporarily forgets the word for wine when pouring for her guests. With an implacable kind of nobility (perfect for Julie Christie), she shakes off the forgetfulness, but not before declaring, "I think I may be beginning to disappear." Later, after Grant (Pinsent) has dropped her off at Meadowlake, a care facility, he asks Kristy—a kind but straight-shooting nurse—"What if this is just her being herself?" What if, rather than losing herself along with her memories, Fiona is instead just tapping into a different mode of being? There are glimpses of the old Fiona in this earlier stage: driving to Meadowlake, she points out a trail that was once the site of her and Grant's adventures.
Away from Her is a bona fide tearjerker. The deterioration of Fiona's memory is a tragedy in itself, but the twist of the knife comes at Meadowlake when, in her increasingly critical state, she forgets Grant altogether and falls in love with someone else, a man named Aubrey (Michael Murphy). The situation tests the purity of Grant's love: can he still be devoted to Fiona, even as she forgets and eventually replaces him? In the sappiest version of this story, the answer to this question would be a desperate yes, filled with the longing that leads Grant to beg Fiona not to go to Meadowlake, whose policy states he would have to refrain from visiting her for a month, to give her time to settle down (the exact time frame that it takes her to forget him entirely). But the real answer is of course more complicated than that, and in his attempt to deal with the mess of the situation, Grant even goes so far as to strike up a friendship and, later, a love affair with Aubrey's wife, Marian (Olympia Dukakis).
Polley's ethos of tolerance and goodwill is pushed to extremes here—Grant has no choice but to finally accept that his wife will be happier with Aubrey than with his efforts to convince her of the role he once played in her life. For her part, what crushes Fiona is not memory loss, but heartbreak. This is how Polley makes a case for the power of love: by depicting its fragile, ephemeral nature rather than its implacability, she spins new beauty into the cliché that you don't know what you have until you lose it—and when I have mentioned the importance of a sense of discovery in Polley’s films, what I've meant is precisely this feeling of revelation. The relationship between Fiona and Grant recasts ideas we might already hold about memory, love, and identity in a new light, guiding us somewhere new through the fullness of its characters, rather than back to a stated intent. It's impossible to say whether your devotion to a person who has forgotten and replaced you could stay intact despite illness, and the film honors this impossibility. Nothing is resolved, and everything is a little bit sad.
***
Women Talking (2022).
Polley's 2022 essay collection, Run Towards the Danger, includes pieces that range in subject matter, from her experiences as a child actor to accounts of motherhood; from family life to professional crises. Many of the essays deal with the unreliability of memory and the way "the meaning of long-ago experiences [transforms] in the context of the ever-changing present." Polley’s recollections of the challenges of child acting and the frequent irresponsibility of the adults in charge are particularly affecting. But there is also an overbearing reliance on the scaffolding that groups these essays together; which is to say, the subtitle of the book, "confrontations with a body of memory," provides a reflexive interpretation to any one subject her narrator tackles.
The second essay in the collection, titled "The Woman Who Stayed Silent," deals explicitly with the memory theme. It is primarily about Polley's experience of sexual assault at the hands of celebrity radio host Jian Ghomeshi, but also about the indifference with which the criminal justice system—in Canada as in the United States—deals with a woman's memory, both expecting her to remember everything and doubting the integrity of her recollection. Polley is thorough and well-informed; she consults lawyers, psychologists, and other victims to create a picture of the burden any woman who comes forward with a sexual assault allegation has to take on. She makes interesting points about how her memories of Ghomeshi changed as time went on, and how these differences affected the way she saw and understood herself. Still, the prose has a nervous quality, a self-reflexive guardedness that seems to want to assure the reader that not only is the narrator aware of her own shortcomings, she is also apologetic for them: every other person is kind or brilliant; throughout the collection, every other woman is "maternal." As a reader, I felt like I’d arrived on the scene too late; I wasn’t witnessing the narrator work through the significance of these events, but the aftermath of that reckoning. Every compelling discovery that could be made had already been uncovered and definitively resolved, and I simply had to take the writer at her word that there had been any confrontation with memory at all. Polley had wrapped a statement of intention in the book’s subtitle, but I might expect such a justification to emerge spontaneously from the writing itself.
It seems as though with time, Polley has come to rely on storytelling crutches: before Women Talking starts in earnest, a title card appears to frame the story. Set over the green plains of the colony, it reads: "What follows is an act of female imagination." This title card is not only unnecessary, but also broadly representative of Women Talking's central flaw: an overzealous, compulsory desire to justify itself before it has had a chance to begin. By directing the viewer's attention to the ideas contained in the story rather than the story itself, the title card puts up a barrier between the audience and the film. Why remind us that what we're about to see is an act of imagination when the viewer can already be counted on to approach a narrative fiction, even if it's based on real events, with a built-in acceptance of the primacy of imagination to the experience? A choice like this evinces a heavy-handedness at odds with Polley's otherwise gentle approach.
Like the problem of the sex-talk sequence in Take This Waltz, I would happily embrace conceptual boldness if it weren't handled so self-consciously. The risks Polley takes in that film work because they not only feel like risks (as in, there was a chance they might not pay off), but they are also organic to the story they were telling. Margot, in her confusion and infatuation, would put herself in such an awkward situation—it's the first of many steps she takes towards the eventual dissolution of her marriage. In Women Talking, the forcefulness of the approach, imposed on the story as much as on the viewer, dominates the characters: it's almost impossible to escape the sense that the film is happening in service of the conversation it hopes to spark, rather than in service of the story itself.
Women Talking (2022).
While the women in the colony are illiterate, the boys attend school; it's the boys' school teacher, August (Ben Whishaw), whom the women enlist to take the minutes of their meeting. He has been in love with the saintly Ona (Rooney Mara) since he was a boy, and his own family was once excommunicated because of his mother's open-mindedness. Though in the novel August is the narrator, in the film he is a mere token of sensitive masculinity, a harmless man whose actions and desires are perfectly aligned with his commitment to sit down and listen. August cries copiously and is moved to tears by the slightest manifestation of a communal will; he apologizes promptly and puts his tail between his legs whenever a woman gives him a hard time. Though it's clear she loves him, Ona won't marry him, and he indulges in the tragedy of their impossibility—a martyr for the cause of women's emancipation, he seems to be crying as he nails himself to the cross. At one point, discussing whether or not to leave boys behind, the words "but not all men" are sincerely uttered, in case we hadn't already gotten the message.
It's not August's presence, exactly, that seems amiss: rather, his character is, at least in the script, fatally underwritten, failing to fill out anything more than the broadest outlines. The underdevelopment of the relationship between August and Ona in particular is a major missed opportunity. Ona, whose philosophical bent and resigned smile give her an air of youthful wisdom, won't marry August because if she did, she tells him, "[she] wouldn't be [herself.] So the person [he loves] would be gone." Later, in a moment of actual human emotion, she passes judgment onto Mariche (Jessie Buckley) for not doing anything in the face of the violent abuse Mariche's husband unleashes on her and their children. Incensed, Mariche attacks Ona, telling her: "You're a spinster. A whore. An unwed mother." Before the moment can gain enough traction to become revealing of these two characters' inner lives, Ona apologizes for being judgmental, and Mariche moves on. The film hints throughout that although Ona appears to be a perfect figure of faith and devotion, she also leads an unconventional life inside the colony: by putting her independence above the pressure to marry, she seems to be able to cultivate a life of the mind. If explored, this contradiction could give her enough depth to bypass the lasting impression that she is an infallible sister and neighbor; that her gentle guidance can only lead somewhere good.
Early on in their discussion, as they make pros and cons lists arguing each of their options, Ona asks August to make sure to "write large" and post the lists up on the wall for everyone to see. Mejal (Michelle McLeod) asks why: "We can't read it." Ona quickly replies, "No, but we'll keep it here as an artifact for others to discover." Like the title card and August's compulsive apologies, moments like these are what finally smother the film altogether: the characters are mouthpieces for their own meaning, stating outright what they stand for and the overall intention of the story they are supposedly inhabiting. In this dynamic, their emotions and motives feel imposed upon them rather than discovered; like in Polley's essays, the viewer is readily cognizant of the interpretation they are supposed to have. Women Talking is at its best when it is least controlled, when the characters' relationships, whether in anger or love, surface despite the words they are literally speaking—when Mariche calls Ona a whore, or when, rallying around Salome (Claire Foy) to lull her little four-year-old into sleep, the women join each other in song. In these moments, we are seeing and experiencing the effects of a cruel, senseless violence on these character's lives.
In her Oscar acceptance speech for Best Screenplay, Polley said: "Miriam Toews wrote an essential novel about a radical act of democracy in which people who don't agree on every single issue managed to sit together in a room and carve out a way forward, free of violence. They do so not just by talking but by listening." That may well be true, but I can't shake the sense that where Polley sees disagreement at the heart of the story, I see agreement—an agreed-upon intolerance of oppression and injustice; a willingness to break with cycles of violence, to stand up for yourself and for those you love; an agreement to not take this anymore, not even for a second longer. There is a deep courage inherent to the story, but it gets muffled by Polley's need to over-explain; rather than truly throwing down the gauntlet, by repeatedly stating the obvious and stopping there, it feels more like she is apologetically putting the gauntlet down. I just wish she would have used her sincerity and earnestness to throw it more forcefully, without announcing it first.