Dir. Randall Miller, US, 2005, 103 mins
Cast: Robert Carlyle, John Goodman, Marisa Tomei, Mary Steenburgen
Review by Carol Allen
This is a very sweet and touching tale about healing grief and learning to love again, which was developed out of a thirty minute short, which writer/director Miller made in 1990, about a little boy being forced to attend ballroom dancing classes at Ms Hotchkiss's establishment. The story has though moved on a long way from its origins.
In a very different role from his usual Scottish tough guy ones, Carlyle is touchingly vulnerable as Frank, a bereaved baker in mourning for his late wife, whose ashes he keeps on the dresser. His life is changed by a chance encounter on the highway with a stranger Steve (Goodman), fatally injured in a car crash. Steve is the little boy of the earlier short now grown up and on his way to fulfill a promise made forty years earlier to meet his childhood sweetheart at the school. With his dying breath he persuades Frank to keep the appointment in his place. There Frank meets Meredith (Tomei) and her beauty combined with the power of dance and the companionship of the other students all conspire to bring him back to life.
Although the premise could have made this a sentimental tale, the sincere charm of its telling and its strong cast make it genuinely touching and engaging. Mary Steenburgen in particular is luminous as Marienne Hotchkiss, the gentle, soft voiced and ladylike heiress to the indomitable and now deceased Marilyn (Patricia Fraser), who is seen in flashback. Steenburgen also does a mean version of a dance called the Lindy hop. The dancing generally is rather good, particularly from Donnie Walhberg (Mark's big brother), playing Meredith's dominating and bullying stepbrother, who falls to pieces when Merienne bans him from the class, which is the only thing that gives his life meaning. The supporting cast of familiar faces includes Sean Astin, David Paymer, Sonia Braga and Danny DeVito.
The film is also very impressive visually, with the story moving around in time using distinctively different colour palettes and styles from the present in the dance school, where life is burgeoning, to the cold grey blues of the immediate past, where Goodman tells his dying tale and the grainy warmth of the school in the sixties - footage presumably taken from that earlier short. An unusual and oddly satisfying little film.
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