What Went Wrong?
Shall We Dance
By Nathan Williams

Remakes. Who needs ‘em, right? Nobody rewrites Moby Dick. Nobody re-records Pet Sounds (at least not as a whole). They do it in painting but it’s called forgery. Yet in Hollywood the practice is not only common, it’s the easiest way to get a project greenlit (outside of attaching Johnny Depp). Remakes ought to be outlawed, banned in the name of Homeland Security. Those who perpetuate them are nothing but bandits—cruel and degenerate despoilers of the graves of honest men.

Well, my friends, if you believe all that, then this isn’t the column for you. Sure, there are a few bad remakes. But for every five insipid Truth About Charlie’s, there’s a perfectly decent Thomas Crown Affair (though the original is miles better). Even the masters partake sometimes: Hitchcock had had a dud remake (Man Who Knew Too Much) and a great one (North by Northwest); Ozu built a career on remaking the same five or six films, and they got better pretty much every time; Scorsese already has one in the can (Cape Fear) and two others on the way (Infernal Affairs/The Departed and Drunken Angel).

However, this column does not hide from reality. Most remakes stink. They are often so bad as to hurt the reputation of the original. But most movies stink, too. In fact, the quality rate for remakes is not much lower than films in general. And original films that are bad usually fail on so many levels as to make analysis of them difficult. Bad script or just bad direction? Poor casting or just weak acting? Flawed premise or botched execution? With remakes, we already know what works, because the original has done it. A much more surgical analysis of a film’s failings is then possible. And, hopefully, we can learn something more generally about how good cinema is created.

This month: Shall We Dance.

Kids today might not believe it, but a long time ago, in the late 90s, Miramax used to find independent and foreign films of high quality, purchase their domestic distribution rights, and then distribute them to theatres, often very soon after the film was completed. I know this sounds nothing like the company we know and love today, but even the most beautiful stallion once was an ungainly colt. In 1997, the Weinsteins released a Japanese film (by Masayuki Suo) called Shall We Dance? The film was a small art-house hit and made almost ten million dollars in the U.S. (at the time this was good money for Miramax).

The film concerns a semi-depressed Japanese office worker who becomes infatuated with a woman he sees outside his train window every evening as he rides home to his wife, daughter, and modest house. The woman in question works in a small ballroom dance studio, and, despite achieving material success and domestic security, our hero secretly signs up for dance classes just to be near the strange beauty. The film has a small number of well-developed, well-performed characters and more than a little genuine humanity. It mostly avoids clichés and only briefly flirts with marital moralizing. Apart from a few unnecessary monologues, it is written with great restraint. The dance sequences are effectively constructed, and it uses depth of screen space well, particularly for humor.  It suffers somewhat from Runaway Comic Character Syndrome (a character that clearly got more screen time because he was cracking everyone up on set), but the boat isn’t rocked enough to take on too much water, and the character is genuinely funny. The film is somewhat over-infatuated with the liberating powers of dance, and could be better structured. Made on the cheap, it sometimes looks hastily lit and the score is mediocre (often synthesized).

In sum, a solidly entertaining, recognizably human picture with a few flaws. Worth watching and—also—a perfect candidate for the art of the remake. The premise is proven. It appealed to American audiences but not so much that everyone’s already seen it. A slightly bigger budget wouldn’t have hurt it, nor would some top-flight music. Strictly Ballroom was over a decade ago, but people will always love dancing, right? The Weinsteins came to the same conclusion and said, we already own the rights, let’s remake the bastard (well, they probably said something along those lines but with infinitely more vulgarity).

So at the expense of more than $50 million came 2004’s Shall We Dance (curiously shorn of its question mark), starring Richard Gere, Susan Sarandon, and Jennifer Lopez. As anyone who’s seen it can attest, the film is curiously dead-on-arrival. Watching it sometimes feels like dancing with a corpse; you have to prop the thing up just to keep yourself interested. But autopsies are what this column is all about, so let’s get into it.

What went wrong?

Decision #1: the director. I’m sure Peter Chesholm is a helluva nice guy. At one point in the film he lets a bad scene between Gere and Lopez play out with the great Fred Astaire film The Bandwagon reflecting on glass in front of their faces. Though it is a terrible decision (who wants to watch Gere and Lopez talk past each other when you can watch Fred Astaire and Cyd Charisse!?), the man clearly knows what good movies are. Alas, he does not seem to be capable of making them, at least not on a high-pressure, big star level.

Chesholm directed the legendary disaster, Town and Country, and the coloring-book romantic comedy, Serendipity. He’s really the bottom of the barrel for a film of this budget and the Weinsteins ought to know better. He has no idea what he’s doing filming dance scenes. Gere and Lopez are not great dancers (Lopez’s Japanese counterpart was a professional dancer, and she was a joy to watch), but they are decent, and watching them actually dance is vastly preferable to cutting between medium shots of faces and feet. The cutting is much too rapid, and the sequences, especially the waltzes, are wholly devoid of grace. The dialogue is competently shot without overuse of close-ups, but it’s pretty evident Chesholm was scared to death of trying to coax any kind of performance out of Lopez.

Mostly, it seems as if Chesholm was trying to not to do anything wrong and he ended up doing very little right.

Decision #2: casting. First of all, someone ought to be commended for casting Susan Sarandon. Not only is she three years older than Gere, she has a terrific absence of vanity that makes her the most attractive 59 year-old leading lady within memory.  She is too big a star to play the meek hand-wringer of her Japanese counterpart, but this is the sort of thing that was inevitable in the cultural translation anyway. She has some awful material to work with, but maintains more dignity and believability than the rest of the cast put together. Lopez is not nearly as good, but seems capable of playing an aloof beauty, at least under the direction of a greater talent.

Gere is a likable, relaxed leading man. He usually chooses bad scripts but is better than many give him credit for. He has, however, no place portraying a depressed lawyer for whom dance becomes his only passion. In a recent interview Chesholm describes Gere’s character as “clinically depressed.” Wrong. Gere is jovial, smug, and, at his lowest ebb, maybe a little bored. Sure there are some coldly lit shots of him peering out the window of his L-train, but never do you get the sense that this man has any sort of problems that a weekend golf trip wouldn’t cure. And if he took ballroom dancing lessons, there is no reason why he wouldn’t take his wife, or at least inform her. He’s almost certainly the reason this thing broke even at the box office, but he’s also a major reason why you just don’t believe a damn thing that is happening.

Another unfortunate casting decision is Stanley Tucci. It is rumored that Stanley Tucci once had self-respect, though many scholars are skeptical. In the Japanese version, his character is both hilarious and pathetic. He is a visibly wounded soul that can only feel joy on the dance floor. He is at once ridiculous and tragic. Tucci settles for being consistently annoying and, to boot, a terrible dancer. At one point his character is supposed to finally let go of his inhibitions and realize his true dancing potential, but Tucci, having no higher gears, just sort of jumps around (as Chesholm cuts around the room with extreme rapidity).  The big question is whether anyone really wanted him in this role, or Lopez merely hooked him up after making friends on Maid in Manhattan.

Decision #3: the writing. Actually, the script oughtn’t be held against the Weinsteins. Audrey Wells does seem like a good choice for adapting this sort of material. She has a record of intelligent, character-driven romantic comedies (Guinevere, The Truth About Cats and Dogs) and should be up to the task of adaptation. The reality of the original does rest somewhat strongly on the notion of Japanese corporate male timidity; ballroom dancing is so unfettered as to be socially embarrassing. But somehow establish the character as inhibited and withdrawn (not especially un-American traits), change as little as possible, and the film should work just fine. Or, if you’re feeling bold, reinvent it entirely. Just don’t make countless seemingly superficial changes that add up to a movie that achieves nothing. But this is what Wells has done.

An abbreviated list of bewildering alterations follows. The protagonist is no longer a cog in the corporate machine but a successful lawyer. His wife is no longer a stay-at-home wallflower but a successful manager of Saks Fifth Avenue (!?). Their home, accordingly, is now quite large. The financial difficulty of the wife hiring a private investigator now comes across as petty haggling.

Gere’s fellow novice dancers are now broad sitcom stereotypes (as are most of the supporting cast). The somewhat poignant heavyset female dancer is turned into a fat, obnoxious whore. The defensive short man becomes a poorly closeted homosexual. The kindly dance teacher is a manic alcoholic (is this possible?). Et cetera.

Clever physical humor becomes sitcom put-down humor. Simple, effective montages become sloppy narrative shortcuts. Gere and his fellow dancers are “good” after one or two lessons and never seem to improve for the remainder of the film. The thoughtful private investigator is now a crude, disgusting man with a hip, young assistant who unconvincingly quotes Thoreau (in some truly painful “deep” moments).

Occasionally, lines will emerge untouched from the original, and they stand out for their earnestness (and the performers’ clear uncomfortableness with them). The ending is significantly altered, turning Gere into the husband of the year instead of just a man who loves his wife. Clearly, no one involved had any real interest in this film making any sort of emotional sense. It always goes for the short money, and so, it seems, did its makers. A complete failure.

Best illustration of the mindset behind this
film: the penultimate, "realizing he loves his wife most of all" montage is set to Peter Gabriel's nauseating cover of Stephin Merritt's cynico-romantic "The Book of Love."

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