I watched the trailer for Take This Waltz the other day and my first thought was that this looked like a pretty good movie. Michelle Williams, Seth Rogen and the rest of the cast look like they turn in solid performances and it’s garnered some positive impressions from critics and commentators I like so my guess is this would be a decent film to see.
But then I started to realize what the movie is about and my interest all but faded away. What I started to focus on wasn’t so much the romantic tension between the married woman played by Williams and the single guy she meets on a flight who winds up living in her neighborhood and who she develops something more serious than a crush on.
Instead it was the fact that the single guy in this situation, played by Luke Kirby, doesn’t simply get up and walk away from the situation once he finds out she’s married. No, he continues coming around the house she shares with her husband (played by Rogen) and says he’d like to spend the day with her and al sorts of other tender and emotionally vulnerable things.
What I realized is that while the movie on paper was right up my alley I had almost zero interest in watching such an awful, amoral character. Any guy who’s not a hedonistic asshole hears “I’m married” and drops the mic. He’s done. He’s out. That’s all she wrote. He doesn’t continue to hang around making puppy dog eyes saying “Hey, it’s cool if you cheat on your husband because we’re, like, soul mates.” Those are the guys who will be the first against the wall when the revolution comes.
This isn’t about “asking questions” as the movie’s synopsis would have us think. This is about the kind of people who feel that unless they are happy and entertained ALL THE TIME they should be free to change their situation without giving a tinker’s damn about anyone else. And that adds up to a movie about awful, inconsiderate people that I’d rather not see.
