Saturday, July 21, 2012

Lightweight Ballroom Escapism

Film Review:
Shall We Dance

2004 / 1 hr., 46 min. / PG-13

Director: Peter Chelsom

There is something fun about dance movies.  The peppy music and vivacious choreography lend a certain attraction, not just to flamboyant comedies like Strictly Ballroom, but even down to the more tepid attempts such as Marilyn Hotchkiss’ Ballroom Dancing & Charm School.

Shall We Dance is somewhere in between.  It’s not an “important” movie, and will never be a classic even within its genre – but it is sweet, humorous, and, yes, has me considering taking up ballroom dancing.

John Clark (Richard Gere) is an estate lawyer who spends every workday dealing with people who are preparing for death.  He is successful, with a loving wife (Susan Sarandon), two kids who are so clean-cut their worst fault is talking on a cell phone during dinner, a great house, and a well-paying job that isn’t going away until people stop dying.  In fact, as I write this paragraph, I am stunned: It has long been my complaint that far too many writers have become lazy, falling back on the premise of a pending or actual divorce to frame their narratives because it’s a quick and easy way to set up tension.  In Shall We Dance, we basically have the Cleaver family descendants: Dad works, Mom may have the second job but she does all the cooking, including hand-preparing farm-fresh green beans for dinner.  The kids are not Goth-absorbed angry rebels, there are no piercings, tattoos, or swear words.  How utterly refreshing: Someone in Hollywood daring to create a film about a healthy family.

What is a problem is John’s growing awareness of a certain stale quality to life.  In to work on the train, deal with wills and testaments, back home on the train, on a good night the whole family eats at the same time before Mom heads off to a meeting of some kind.  Nothing particularly dysfunctional, just mundane to the point of numbing.

Night after night John’s train ride home takes him past Miss Mitzi’s dancing school, where the contemplative face of a beautiful young woman (Jennifer Lopez) stares out at the world.  One night, out of compulsively irresistible curiosity, John disembarks the train early and enters the dance school where he gets railroaded by the beautiful young woman, Paulina, into joining the beginner’s class, taught, not as he had hoped, by the elder Miss Mitzi (Anita Gillette) instead.

Unable to tell his family what he has gotten involved in, but unable to stop going because of the way it begins to dispel the doldrums, John keeps attending the classes.  Eventually Miss Mitzi sees in him enough talent to compel him into a local ballroom dance competition, and that’s where I’ll stop.

There is a certain straightforward and commonplace quality about the film that makes it hard to really critique.  It is too well done to provide fodder for delightfully caustic sarcasm, and too plain to elicit hyperbolic praise.  It’s – it’s – it’s – a nice movie.  It is adapted by Audrey Wells from a Japanese script, and capably helmed by director Peter Chelsom so that the experience is as entertaining as it should be: For the duration of the film.

I very much appreciated the rare opportunity to see a movie that did not hinge on heavy, gritty, heart-breaking problems.  John has a perfectly harmless mid-life crisis: He takes up dance, but is too embarrassed about this sudden change in his life to tell his family about it.  As a bonus from my perspective, I can kind of relate: I recently took up bodybuilding after 20 years of shunning all things Physical Fitness.  (I did, however, let my wife know first.)

Richard Gere (The Mothman Prophecies) plays John as the ordinary man he is.  This does not seem to be a role that requires intense depth and character study – I imagine he took the part because he had such fun learning to tap-dance for Chicago and wanted an excuse to continue dancing.  And get paid for it, no less.  (Hey, I’d love to get paid to bodybuild in preparation for a movie role!)

Gere blends well with Susan Sarandon (Enchanted) who plays his wife Beverly as an ordinary woman.  Because she is left out of John’s new hobby, her part gets to be more than just the nagging spouse, and she fills it capably.  Their most tense moments together do not involve high-stakes shouting matches and broken dishes; the tensions are mostly in the quiet pauses, and in Sarandon’s eyes moving oh-so-slightly askance.

If there was a weak point among the lead performers, I felt it was Jennifer Lopez (Maid in Manhattan).  In fact, I almost forgot about her just now.  The role of Paulina is a grounding reality to the film’s humor, leaving Lopez with really not much to do.  Her performance is functional, but next to the other characters, she feels deficient.

Richard Jenkins (Burn After Reading) shows up as a private detective who eats compulsively; Jenkins has always been good as the side character that is not necessarily off-putting, but which you just wouldn’t want to get too close to.  Stanley Tucci (The Terminal) throws himself into his role as a fellow repressed lawyer, unleashing his inner Latin Lover through the dance classes; Lisa Ann Walter (Bruce Almighty) is a sassy dancer looking for a new competition partner; and John is joined in the beginner’s class by Omar Miller (8 Mile) and Bobby Cannavale (Paul Blart: Mall Cop).  There are the obligatory scenes of this beginning trio being so inept as to be unbelievable, but eventually the film settles into a more realistic humor that springs naturally from the situation.

Also a bit unbelievable is the obligatory rush to enter the upcoming competition.  At least in Strictly Ballroom both dancers were experienced.  Here, John Clark goes from know-nothing to poster boy in record time.  Maybe that’s possible – I don’t know how long it takes to master ballroom dances – but it feels improbable here.  At least give our hero three months instead of two, or something like that.  If the film weren’t otherwise entertaining, I would more strongly complain.

In the end, Shall We Dance is a passing piece of fun entertainment that will do the rounds among people who are open to harmless works of amusement, and then it will quietly disappear.  But after years of reading high-minded film reviews by elitist professional critics who disdain anything that doesn’t have long-lasting envelope-pushing socio-political resonance, my thought is: What’s the harm in a movie’s being both enjoyable and forgettable?  As enjoyable, forgettable movies go, Shall We Dance is a winner.

My Score: 7