“Away From Her” is one of the best directorial debuts in recent memory — actress Sarah Polley, best known for Atom Egoyan’s “The Sweet Hereafter” showed a remarkable maturity in both her writing and her direction, and we included the film as one of our favorites of 2007. There’d been no word for a while on a follow-up (although Polley appears in Vincenzo Natali’s “Splice,” which just premiered at Sundance), until the Black List brought mention of a new script by her, a contemporary romantic drama entitled “Take This Waltz.”
Polley’s now assembled the financing for the project, which will start filming in Toronto in July, and has assembled a pretty topnotch cast. Michelle Williams, who’s currently getting great reviews for another Sundance film, “Blue Valentine” (a project not dissimilar to Polley’s), will play Margot, the lead, a 28 year old woman, who’s been married to her husband Leo for five years. She meets a man named Seth on a business trip, who turns out to live across the street from the couple, and the two begin an awkward flirtation, which soon threatens to blossom into something more.
Seth Rogen will co-star with Williams, and it’s not a stretch to assume he’ll be playing the character that shares his name — indeed, the speech patterns seem to fit the actor so well that it’s possible Polley wrote the role for the “Knocked Up” star. But it’s also possible he could be playing Leo — it’s the kind of part that a twentysomething John C. Reilly would have played, and Rogen would be an interesting, if against-type pick for that part. But it does sound like Williams and Rogen are the two leads so probably not.
Either way, Polley’s script promises to be a real stretch for the comedy star — it’ll be by far his most dramatic work to date, and, considering the presence of Williams as well, who’s fast becoming one of the best actresses of her generation, we can’t wait to see how it turns out. We’re going to have a full script review of “Take This Waltz” very soon, but our brief skim-read was promising, even if it brushes close to full-on Sundance indie quirk territory early on, but seems to settle into something much more interesting, and much sadder.
Interesting to see Rogen go in this direction, but being a Canadian actor, almost everyone in the industry there has high respect for Polley who started out her career as a child star, turned down the opportunity to go Hollywood a long time ago (she notoriously dropped out of the lead in “Almost Famous” right before shooting, just on gut instinct, and Kate Hudson obviously turned into a star) and is essentially a key veteran of Canada’s film scene. So in a way, it makes a lot of sense. We know we’d jump at the chance to work with her and we bet Rogen did too.
Also, as a few people have noted, “Take This Waltz” is the name of a 1988 Leonard Cohen song (also a Canadian) from the album, I’m Your Man. And like many Cohen songs, it’s a oblique, broken love song, but with lyrics adapted from “Little Viennese Waltz” by Federico García Lorca.