On a lonely desert road in the stark hills outside Los Angeles a released convict passes a delivery man on a treacherous winding road. That man is on his way to a date he made forty years previous with his first and only love. They agreed to meet, no matter what, at the Marilyn Hotchkiss' Ballroom Dancing and Charm School in Pasadena, California. He doesn’t make the date and sends the delivery man in his place, who finds a whole new world in dancing and finds a whole new world in himself as well.
The released convict on the way to the date of a lifetime is rounder Steve Mills played by veteran actor John Goodman (“Barton Fink,” and “The Big Lebowski”). Goodman does not have a huge amount of exposure in this film, and most of it is laying in an ambulance, but his portrayal of man ashamed of his life and aiming at that one last chance at redemption is perfect. If you haven’t seen him in “Barton Fink” get the DVD and check it out before you see this one.
The lead in the action is Robert Carlyle playing baker and delivery man Frank Keane. Keane has never recovered from the loss of his wife several years back and his group therapy sessions in the local armory don’t seem to be helping. He keeps his wife’s ashes next to those of his dog on the top of his dresser. He is not doing well. The character of Frank Keene is a popular one in contemporary drama. he has suffered a loss and cannot move on. Carlyle has a difficult role to play, that of the sensitive male, made all the more difficult by what seems to be his inherently macho charisma. Maybe it was his psycho Begbie role in “Trainspotting” (1996) or perhaps his hard drinking IRA father role in the slums of Limerick in “Angela’s Ashes,” (1999) but he just naturally looks tough. Nonetheless, he pulls some of that “Full Monty” charm out of the hat to put out a corker of a performance as the heart broken Keene who has a meeting with fate that he would never have imagined.
That meeting with fate will take place at the Marilyn Hotchkiss school, where young Steve Mills met and fell in love forty years earlier. Keene is to go there and deliver a message from Mills but when he gets there at the appointed date and time, Mills amour is a no show. In her place is Meredith Morrison (Marisa Tomei—“My Cousin Vinney,” “In the Bedroom”). Meredith is guarded over by her overly protective step brother Randall (Donnie Wahlberg—“Dreamcatcher”) with whom she survived an abusive childhood at the hands of their psychotic father. Frank, Meredith and Randall all have one thing in common, they have suffered emotional traumas that have rendered them incapable of attachment. They are severely lonely people.
This trio and a host of supporting players come together at the Hotchkiss School taught by the daughter of the original Marilyn Hotchkiss, Marianne, played to a tee by Mary Steenburgen. Steenburgen handles her diction with that vague southern drawl that is a ghostly rendition of Blanche Du Bois from “Streetcar Named Desire.” She is at the same time ghostly and angelic and we are not sure if she is inviting us to heaven or to hell. But we are surely lured one way or the other.
Director Randall Miller also edited the film and developed the three different photographic techniques used. He chose a wide screen format that allowed plenty of space between characters to emphasize the visual story line of distance versus attachment. For the ballroom dance sequences he used standard color photography shot in brightly lit surroundings to emphasize the breaking down of emotional baggage and coming together. For the introductory scenes of Keene and Mills before Mills’ crash, Miller shoots with a “bleach bypass” process which increases the contrast of the film and exaggerates the stark nature of the landscape and events. For the memory sequences he uses a grainy resolution with antique and sepia tones with occasional horizontal highlights breaking through. The effect is of glimpsing a world beyond this, a world of the past and of the future.
John Goodman puts out one of his best performances as a flawed hero trying to do the right thing by the love he left behind. Robert Carlyle and Marisa Tomei produce excellent performances with more than sufficient horsepower to drive the romantic drama all the way to the finish line. The cinematography is excellent and includes sepia-toned flashback segments with lighting highlights that definitively separate the past from the present. The stark Southern California landscape provides a blank palette on which to paint the picture of the loneliness, heartbreak and re-birth of the characters.
This is a very sweet and sincere story line that has tremendous potential for mass appeal among adult audiences. If it capitalizes on good old fashioned schmaltz here and there, it makes up for that with genuine and energetic performances from a stellar cast.
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