If you want to see joy glide across a face entranced by dance, you’ll do well to rent the rapturous “Mad Hot Ballroom.” And if you want to learn the fox-trot cure for male emotional meltdowns, pick up 2004’s “Shall We Dance?” – or better, its Japanese original.
Even “Dancing With the Stars” offers more unexpected pleasures than “Marilyn Hotchkiss’ Ballroom Dancing & Charm School,” the latest entry in a seemingly unending craze.
It’s not entirely co-writer/director Randall Miller’s fault that his film must catch our eye across a crowded ballroom. The feature is based on a short film he made 15 years ago. Still, this sentimental journey of a widower changed by dance shows not a single new step.
Frank Keane (Robert Carlyle) bakes bread. Making his way along his delivery route, he’s passed by a car. A big man smiles. Shortly, Frank comes upon a one-car smashup. Wedged behind the wheel is a bloodied man named Steve.
Steve was racing to keep an appointment made decades earlier with Lisa. They were to meet at Hotchkiss’ school, where as children they learned to despise each other.
These things Steve (John Goodman) tells Frank at the site of the wreck and later in the ambulance. And Frank undertakes a mission to tell Lisa that Steve won’t be making it.
Steve’s fate stretches the length of the movie. Will he expire or not? He certainly won’t depart before sharing many a flashback about the early 1960s, when Miss Hotchkiss put the boys on the blue line and the girls on the pink.
Hangdog Frank doesn’t find Lisa. Nor the original instructor. Daughter Marienne (Mary Steenburgen) rules the class with a tremulous voice.
But he does – on the downbeat please – find himself, and Meredith (Marisa Tomei).
Regret, loss and second chances all get their spot on the dance card. And none of the actors is clumsy. Yet the film moves like a newbie following a diagram of arrows and shoes and counting out loud.
** | “Marilyn Hotchkiss’ Ballroom Dancing & Charm School”
NOT RATED |1 hour, 43 minutes|ROMANTIC DRAMA| Directed by Randall Miller; written by Miller and Jody Savin; photography by Jonathan Sela; starring Robert Carlyle, Marisa Tomei, Mary Steenburgen, Donnie Wahlberg, John Goodman, Sean Astin |Opens today at the Chez Artiste.
