Last weekend, Joey and I pulled up our Netflix queue so we could settle into a Friday night movie. Side Note: Our queue used to be packed full of movies but is now in serious need of re-filling! The one we picked was called, you guessed it, Take This Waltz. It starred Michelle Williams (who I find so so annoying and this movie was no exception to that rule) and Seth Rogen, in what I consider to be his most vulnerable and real role. You forget it’s even him…until that laugh. And while I think the film was mostly about the banality of marriage and the temptation of something new (happily cannot relate!), there was a scene that really stayed with me.
Michelle Williams, who plays Margot, says:
“I remember when my niece, Toni, was a newborn, I’d babysit her and sometimes she’d cry, like babies do. Nine times out of ten I could solve the problem, I could figure it out, but…sometimes when I’m walking along the street and a shaft of sunlight falls in a certain way across the pavement and I just want to cry. And a second later, it’s over. And I decide, because I’m an adult, to not succumb to the momentary melancholy and I had that sometimes with Toni. She just had a moment like that. A moment of not knowing how, or why, and she just let herself go into it. And there was nothing anyone could do to make it any better — it was just her, and the fact of being alive, colliding.”
As someone who’s easily (and sometimes wildly) affected by the smallest of things, my mood can go up or down in the snap of a finger and I found this scene kind of eye-opening. That perhaps, instead of letting a momentary feeling completely break me and send me into a emotional meltdown, I should just remember that that feeling will pass. Not necessarily that I should write off my own feelings, but that I shouldn’t take them so seriously. They are fleeting and they might seem totally silly and unimportant by the next day.
Although I had some real mixed feelings on the movie — it’s quirky, almost to the point of being unrealistic — but I also found it refreshing, thought-provoking and even funny. Seth Rogen is a delight and SPOILER ALERT, the part where Margot realizes that for years, what she thought was her shower randomly blasting her with a spray of cold water, was actually her husband pouring a cup of water over her head was brilliant, in both a funny and sad sort of way. And dare I say, I kind of loved Sarah Silverman’s character?
And with that, I promise no more talk to TV or movies for this week. But only because it’s already Friday 😛
Life as Lauren 