As light and silly as you expect, but not as formulaic

Rating: 6/10 (25 February 2005)

"Shall We Dance," a remake of a Japanese film I have not seen, looks like it's going to be an ancient formula picture: bored married man spots beautiful dance instructor; they dance; tension; sex; conflict; happy ending. Yet it somehow manages to break free from the mechanics of these movies, and I found it surprisingly entertaining. It does not offer any insight, and there are no scenes in it which have any weight (although there are some that think they do), and yet its characters do not feel like they are trapped in a plot. You actually feel like the characters, however lacking in depth they are, make their own choices. It scrapes a pass.
Richard Gere plays a lawyer married to a... well, her job has something to do with fashion, I think. She's played by Susan Sarandon. The Gere character feels his life has grown monotonous and repetitive, and his marriage stale. His name is John, but you've probably already gathered that.
Every day, on the train home from work, he looks up at a certain station and sees Jennifer Lopez looking out the window of a dancing studio. Soon enough he is signed up for dancing lessons. Well, one can hardly blame him. The problem with seeing Jennifer Lopez in any movie is that she makes everyone else look like... well, like mere human beings.
The dancing school is filled, naturally, with a Cast of Colourful Characters. Omar Miller is the overweight man trying to lose some weight before his marriage, and Bobby Cannavale is the lady's man who believes that if he can dance well, women will drop to his feet. The school is owned by Miss Mitzi (Anita Gillette), whose smile, we suspect, hides the tracks of her tears (the way she knocks back booze from a hip flask when no one is looking is a dead giveaway). Lopez is Paulina, a professional dancer who is sick of people joining dance classes to get in her pants.
John keeps his dancing from his wife, who begins to suspect, inevitably, the he's having an affair. In an absurd but amusing subplot, she hires a cartoon private detective to follow him around. Another subplot involves Link, a co-worker of John, played by Stanley Tucci. He is a serious businessman who watches a lot of American Football, but who secretly, Gere discovers, goes to dancing lessons too, wearing astonishingly flamboyant costumes. Well, the trailer gives that away anyway. Tucci often plays characters with a business-like seriousness, as in "The Terminal," and in this movie I liked the way that the seriousness is actually masking his inner extrovert.
You no doubt think you know where the plot is going, and you would not be entirely wrong. You would also not be entirely right. We suspect that sooner or later Gere will sleep with Lopez (or, at least, kiss her), but no, their brief flirtation leads to some sweaty dancing in place of a sex scene. Gere doesn't have much of a sex drive in the movie; we suspect that he really does just want to dance with Lopez. I guess I'd settle for that.
I don't know how closely the movie follows the Japanese original, but on its own, it's entertaining enough. It's light and fun, and it doesn't execute its story in the ways I expected. Yes, it leads up to a big dancing competition, but even then it doesn't pile on the clichÃ©s. Most of its appeal comes down to the actors; Gere has effortless charm (though not much else; he's completely unconvincing when he tries for the big emotions), and Lopez is simply a star, in the best sense of the word. John's two children are almost embarrassingly phony (the movie could have done away with them completely, no harm done), but the sense of fun that the movie has is contagious, and I caught myself smiling enough to recommend it. Part of the reason I liked it is that it rarely felt like it was trying too hard for the smiles.