Men won’t ‘dance’ to this film

Shall We Dance? (2004)
Miramax Films presents a Peter Chelsom film, starring Richard Gere. Written by Audrey Wells, from a film written by Masayuki Suo. 106m. PG-13 for some sexual references and brief language.

1 star

“Shall We Dance?” doesn’t know if it wants to be a film about romance, complacency, family or ballroom dancing. It’s not a good film, and it will find favor with a terribly limited audience. You’ll only love it if you’re willing to concede that ballroom dancing can cure feelings of infidelity, spark tired romances anew and make your dreadful job actually wonderful.

Our narrator is a writer of wills (Richard Gere), who tells us he is bored with his job through frowns that sometimes turn to grimaces. He rides the El train back and forth to his job, where he’s overworked, yet we never see any of his clients.

On that train, he catches the eye of another terribly frowny individual, Paulina (Jennifer Lopez). Paulina looks out the window of Miss Mitzi’s Dance School with her sad face, which remarkably encourages will writer John Clark to sign up for ballroom dance lessons immediately.

John may have signed up for lessons because he’s attracted to Paulina, but we’re not certain. “Shall We Dance?” has an infuriating habit of hedging its bets. If it can hint at a moment of infidelity but not express it, maybe it can have both audiences who are hoping for a little chemistry and those who are not.

I myself was hoping for a little spark, because John is married to the terribly frumpy Beverly (Susan Sarandon), whose dull existence might convince anyone to stay away from their home for long stretches of time.

Alas, it’s John’s until-now-unrealized desire for ballroom dancing - and spicy Puerto Ricans with beautiful derrieres, perhaps - that has drawn him like a magnet to Miss Mitzi’s. I felt this wasn’t too much of a stretch for audiences, since Gere played a - wait for it, wait for it - tap dancing entertainer in his last film.

On his new found odyssey, John is accompanied by comic relief in the form of a stereotypically ungraceful heavy guy (Omar Benson Miller) and a macho man (Bobby Cannavale), who honestly believes what he’s heard about men who can dance. He becomes the stereotypical homosexual using reason only logical in the movie world - by expressing so many homophobic feelings, which proves he must be hiding something.

The true scene stealer of the movie is Stanley Tucci, who plays an accomplished dancer too fragile to admit his successes in the testosterone-induced workplace that is apparently the law firm in which Clark works. This is a far cry from the wealthy murder suspect in “Murder One” that put Tucci in the American consciousness.

As Clark becomes more and more accomplished himself, director Peter Chelsom intersperses more dance sequences into the benign plot. But this is no “Strictly Ballroom,” a movie that lampooned the competition of ballroom dancing while providing the most jaw-dropping visuals courtesy of Baz Luhrmann. Its direction is trite and unflattering to the natural grace and rhythms of the waltz, two-step or mambo.

So unarmed with a visual flair or a working plot, “Shall We Dance?” turns into a women’s weepy more appropriate for repeat showings on the Lifetime channel. Clark’s marriage, of course, is saved by a sa-shay while everyone else finds ridiculously easy gains in the happiness department.

“Shall We Dance?” is adapted from a Japanese movie of the same name that found good success in both overseas and domestic markets. Gone is any sense of the original, which I haven’t seen, or what I imagine it took into consideration. John Clark isn’t overworked as an American lawyer. Yet I imagine Shoehei Sugiyama, the inspiration for Clark, had real issues with the expectations of long hours found in a typical Japanese accounting agency.

Famous cinephile Roger Ebert is notorious for saying it’s not important what movies are about, but how they’re about them. The producers of the redux of “Shall We Dance?” thought they could “Americanize” the script. What they left behind was the real translation.