SYNOPSIS
Chicago lawyer John Clark (RICHARD GERE) knows his life is almost perfect. He loves his beautiful wife (SUSAN SARANDON), he’s built a successful career and raised two wonderful kids. And yet . . . the workday is always the same routine, the commute is a grind and the family’s usually too busy to spend time together. Sometimes John wonders if this is all there is, until one evening on his way home from work he gets off his train and does the unthinkable. Without telling a soul, he secretly begins taking dance lessons. Suddenly, John is thrust into a whole new world – of motion, music, camaraderie and passion. As this very serious man becomes literally light on his feet, his whole life, and marriage, transforms.
The uplifting and comic story of a man’s renewal, SHALL WE DANCE is inspired by the runaway Japanese hit of the same name. In this new version, starring Richard Gere, Jennifer Lopez, Susan Sarandon and Stanley Tucci, the tale of a quiet workaholic finding wild rapture on the dance floor is transported to the American search for happiness.
It all begins when John Clark is riding the evening train, and spots out his window a young dance teacher (JENNIFER LOPEZ) staring back at him from the run-down Miss Mitzi’s Studio. Haunted by her gaze, John looks for her night after night. Finally, he gets off the train and signs up for the beginner’s series of ballroom dance lessons. At his first class, John spends more time on the floor than gliding across it. Awkward and shy, it seems unlikely he’ll ever find any grace at all. But soon, dance becomes John’s obsession, his escape, his one means of pure joy. He’s drawn further and further into this exotic realm, even discovering a fellow employee who’s also hiding his ballroom dance habit (STANLEY TUCCI), while pretending to be a sports jock.
Yet John cannot seem to tell his wife Beverly about his new-found love out of fear that she’ll think he’s unfulfilled by their marriage. As he clandestinely prepares for Chicago’s biggest dance competition, his secretive behavior causes Beverly to hire a detective, suspecting that John’s having an affair. But John will soon discover that it isn’t enough to chase his most private dreams -- because the best part is sharing them.
Review by ELISABETH LEITCH
Elisabeth Leitch is a graduate of the University of California San Diego with a BA in Literature-Writing. A person who has always loved movies, she never ceases to be amazed with the way movies impact viewers by both reflecting and asking questions about the culture and world in which we live. Currently, Elisabeth spends her days working in a local bookstore and seeking what God has in store for her future. She has also worked as a reporter/writer for the Los Alamos Monitor and the New Mexico Business Journal.
I admit it. I had not planned on seeing this movie. As I went to watch it, I already had it pigeonholed into a variety of stereotypes—Richard Gere movie, JLo movie, dance movie, chick flick, probably-not-as-good-as-the-foreign-original movie. Nonetheless, I found myself in a theater with a friend watching it the other night, and even in its simple, fairly predictable story, it caught me. While its previews had marketed the movie primarily as a romantic story about passion and love, as I watched it, I found that Shall We Dance? was about something more than the passion of romance: in the end, it told a story about seeking and finding a passion and love for life itself.
Shall We Dance? opens with Richard Gere’s John Clark riding home on the subway. He is talking to himself or us and tells us he is a lawyer and spends most of his days drawing up wills for his clients. He talks about the things people leave in wills and the process of someone making and revising a will. Then he tells us his response to his clients’ question of “is there anything else?” His answer is: “The rest is up to you,” and in this statement he sets the stage for the movie to come—the reality that sometimes life can seem as structured and mundane as the legalese in a will, but if we choose to seek it, to find it, to see it, life can be much more.
For John Clark, this journey to finding that something more to life occurs through dance. While he leads a good life, has a good job, and loves his family, he still seems discontented. Then, one night, he finds himself enrolling in a dance class after recognizing the same longing he feels inside himself on the face of a woman (Jennifer Lopez) staring out a dance studio window he passes every night. He is joined by two other men—Chic, in it for the women, and Scotty, in it to lose weight and get ready to propose to his girlfriend; Bobbie, a hardworking single mother who spends her evenings dancing; Miss Mitzy, the studio owner and a widow; Paulina (Lopez), a professional dancer who has retreated to the studio after a fall at a major competition; and later, Link (Stanley Tucci), a costumed coworker of Clark’s who loves Latin dance but feels he can’t dance as himself.
As the story unfolds, the members of the class not only learn to dance but also seem to find a deeper value in themselves and in their lives. Miss Mitzy stops going to her bottle in the cupboard during class and smiles, simply because she enjoys what she is doing, Paulina rediscovers her passion for dance, Clark quits moping home every night and instead dances all the way across the street and onto his train, Link eventually loses his wig, and all of the students enter a dance competition together. Although setbacks occur towards the end of the movie, by the time the credits roll, dance has become a positive part of all of the characters’ lives, not as something extra they needed to add, but as something that just helped them find meaning in the lives they already had and the people they already were.
Reflecting on Shall We Dance? in connection with real life, I can’t help but think how much life really can be like dancing. Sometimes we simply don’t know the steps, we feel foolish, and we just don’t know what to do. Other times, we miss steps, we trip, we fall. More often than not, the dance can feel more like a routine, like the same songs and the same steps over and over again, more like marching, less like really dancing. In many instances, we feel as though all we can do is dance alone and even if it is possible, it just isn’t quite the same as having a partner.
Just as all of the characters in Shall We Dance? were able to find value in their lives through dancing, I wonder if we also may be able to find that deeper meaning if we stop moping and marching and start dancing. I think about how lives might be transformed if each movement was not mechanical but filled with passion, emotion, purpose, and direction connected to each step we took. I ask myself how much more meaning each life on earth might have if we, like Clark, stopped being ashamed of not finding meaning in the things the world says should satisfy us and actually seek lives of deeper meaning and purpose.
Just as anyone can chose to join in at a dance or stand by the wall simply to watch, the decision to seek a life of meaning, passion, and emotion is also a choice. In the same way that Paulina urges Clark to not abandon dancing by painting the question “Shall we dance, Mr. Clark?” on a banner, I believe each of us is also being asked the same question on a daily basis, being asked by someone who knows the steps to every dance, who knows each of our individual styles, each of our individual abilities, and the true potential that is inside each and every one of us. In the same way that Beverly Clark’s (Susan Sarandon’s) desire for a husband to be someone to care for her and make sure her life does not go unnoticed or unwitnessed is answered by her husband taking her hand and teaching her to dance, God also extends his hand to that same longing in us, ready to lead us, teach us, pick us up whenever we fall, and asking us not just to live, not just to settle, but to take His hand and let our life become a dance.
