The inexcusably titled “Marilyn Hotchkiss Ballroom Dancing &Charm School” begins with a beautiful sequence that bodes well for the film: On a bleached-looking California highway, a distraught man (Robert Carlyle) driving a bakery truck exchanges nods with a jubilant driver (John Goodman) in a small car. A Hawaiian-strained “Over the Rainbow” plays over their moment of connection.
Then Goodman crashes his car.
As he lies wounded, he babbles to the baker about an appointment he was on his way to keep: 40 years earlier, he’d agreed to meet a childhood sweetheart at a particular spot on the fifth day of the fifth month of the fifth year of the new millennium. Clearly, he’s not going to make it. Could the depressed baker go in his place?
The meeting place, you may have guessed, is the Marilyn Hotchkiss Ballroom Dancing &Charm School. The baker, whose name is Frank, goes there. And a story develops, even though he doesn’t see the childhood sweetheart around. Meanwhile, we keep coming back to Goodman’s dying monologue on the highway, which leads us to childhood flashbacks explaining the connection.
Now, I’m a sucker for the Dying Man’s Request movie, and the pinched, sad-faced “Full Monty” star Robert Carlyle is busy giving a really terrific performance here. But this movie shuffles nice moments in with maudlin and ham-handed ones.
The ballroom dance class is full of lonely adults, notably a shy woman (Marisa Tomei) who hits it off with Frank. But he is nursing his sorrow over a dead wife, and she is protected by a truculent stepbrother (Donnie Wahlberg).
| “Marilyn Hotchkiss Ballroom Dancing &Charm School” HH
Not new: A depressed baker (the excellent Robert Carlyle) fulfills a dying man’s request by visiting a ballroom dance class, which changes his life. Some nice moments and a strong cast, but just not enough here that’s new. With Marisa Tomei, John Goodman. Rated: Not rated; probably PG-13 for subject matter Now showing: Egyptian |
Still, in recent years ballroom dance has become the official movie catalyst for life revival, and so it must be here. The movie box-steps around this while waiting for the inevitable.
A good cast works it, including Mary Steenburgen as the leader of the dance school and Sean Astin and Adam Arkin as members of Frank’s grief-support group. Donnie Wahlberg, former “New Kids on the Block” stalwart, is excellent as the preening and volatile dancer.
Writer-director Randall Miller made a short film by the same title in 1990, and this feature is a radical expansion and re-imagining of that movie. It does tap into a mood that is floating around in the culture right now – the longing for connection and redemption expressed in “Crash,” for instance – but just can’t come up with something piercing or new. This will be a decent DVD time-killer someday, over the rainbow, but it just isn’t better than that.
Donnie Wahlberg and Mary Steenburgen star in “Marilyn Hotchkiss Ballroom Dancing &Charm School.”
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