Sean Patrick Thomas and Julia Stiles in "Save the Last Dance."

MOVIE INFORMATION

With 10 as a must-see, we give this film a: Stars: Julia Stiles and Sean Patrick Thomas Director: Thomas Carter Rated: PG-13, with violence, sexual content, rough language and brief drug references Length: 110 minutes

ROCHESTERCRITIQUE

Having seen this film, how would you rate it? 10 5 9 4 8 3 7 2 6 1

By Marshall Fine
Gannett News Service

(January 12, 2001) -- Pick your favorite dance movie of the past 20 years -- from Flashdance to Dirty Dancing -- and you're bound to find a piece of it in Save the Last Dance.

Directed by Thomas Carter from a script by Duane Adler and Cheryl Edwards, Save the Last Dance has the social conscience of an after-school special. Its soap-opera plotting and race-issue subtext want to paint a picture of contemporary life, but this is strictly color-by-numbers time.

Julia Stiles, so funny in the recent State and Main, plays Sara, a teen whose world is shattered during the opening credits. A ballet whiz in a small Illinois town, she's got Juilliard in her future, if she can just pass the audition. But she blows the try-out when her mother dies in a car accident.

So Sara quits ballet and goes to live with her estranged father Roy (Terry Kinney), a sad-sack jazz musician who resides in Chicago. He enrolls white-bread Sara in the neighborhood high school, which is predominately black. But her culture shock is minimal because she immediately is befriended by the cutest, most popular girl in school, Chenille (Kerry Washington), whose good-looking brother Derek (Sean Patrick Thomas) is equally well-regarded.

Chenille invites Sara to go to a local club for an evening of dancing, but Sara can't dance.

Derek takes her under his wing, schooling her in the ways of hip-hop and transforming her into a slammin' show-stopper.

In the process, she and Derek (who is awaiting word on his application to Georgetown University) fall for each other. That ignites jealousy in his old girlfriend, who confronts Sara and accuses her of trying to steal "our men." For good measure, there are subplots about Derek's loyalty to his pal Malakai (Fredro Starr), just back from prison; Chenille's combative relationship with the absentee father of her baby; and whether or not Sara will rethink her decision about ballet in time to audition for Juilliard again.

It's a given what she'll decide, once Derek discovers her tragic ballet background and tells her, "You're the one who's going to have to make the dream come true."

From that point, it's a question of when, not if, Stiles will do her Jennifer Beals impression for the surprised and approving Juilliard judges.

Stiles and Thomas are likable enough young actors, and director Carter does best when he just lets these two interact.

Dance movement -- ballet or hip-hop -- is not a natural fit on Stiles. In her climactic try-out scene, the editing can't disguise the fact that a dance double is doing most of the tougher moves. The choreography, by Fatima, is as disjointed as the rest of the film.

But Save the Last Dance has bigger problems than Stiles' dancing. The idea that a ballet dancer -- even a ballet dancer from rural Illinois -- would be so completely at sea trying to dance in a nightclub is tough to swallow. Either you have a sense of rhythm or you don't -- but it's certain that you can't be any kind of dancer without one.

More over, the notion that any teen in America today wouldn't know how to dance to hip-hop (or any other R&B derivative) is ludicrous. It's the biggest-selling music going. Children are exposed to it daily on the radio or television. That's true whether you're talking about inner-city Chicago or rural Illinois.

The film also stumbles over the question of interracial dating, which has huge political implications to the black characters in the film but barely seems to register on Sara.

As written, she's blandly color-blind, willing to judge her new friends by their actions rather than their race, something they can't seem to accept.

It's not as if she's a hip-hop wannabe, adopting the poses and argot of her new friends. She also happens to be living in a dump with her chump of a father, so she's not exactly slumming. Yet several black characters turn on her after she and Derek hook up, as though she were the symbol of white oppression made flesh.

But confusion about its central issues is the least of the problems of Save the Last Dance. This is a dance movie that, unfortunately, has two left feet.