This is not a cutting-edge movie. The characters are broad, what happens is predictable, and of course, everything ends up in a big ballroom dancing competition, and (are you ready for this?) at the crucial moment, we get the obligatory scene where the loved one arrives in the audience, sees what is happening and understands all. I'm averaging two versions of that scene a month, most recently in "Raise Your Voice."
Conventional as it may be, "Shall We Dance?" offers genuine delights. The fact that Paulina is uninterested in romance with John comes as sort of a relief, freeing the story to be about something other than the inexorable collision of their genitals. It can be about how John feels about his life, about why it might be useful for a middle-aged lawyer to jump the rails and take up ballroom dance. And about the gallery of supporting characters, who get enough screen time to become engaging.
Stanley Tucci, for example, has fun with Link, who is John Clark's mild-mannered colleague in a Loop law firm. On the dance floor, wearing a flamboyant hairpiece, he becomes a wild man. His dream: "I want to dance before the world in my own name." He fears he would lose his job if he did that, but when John joins the class, he gains courage. He's one of the reasons John stays at Miss Mitzi's even after it becomes clear that Paulina is not available. "Ballroom is all or nothing," Link tells him.
There's one area where the American remake is less than convincing. In the Japanese version, we believe that a faithful wife might remain at home evening after evening while her salaryman husband returned long after work. That's part of the Japanese office culture. That an American wife would put up with it is more problematical. The Clark household, including their teenagers, is not very realistic, but then it exists only as the staging area for the last big scene. I enjoyed the Japanese version so much I invited it to my Overlooked Film Festival a few years ago, but this remake offers pleasures of its own.
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