The Leader

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Dancing with themselves

It's rather ironic, though no longer at all surprising, that all of these movies about staying true to oneself and being an individual are no different than a million other vacuously "inspiring" message movies meant to give the semblance of unique characters doing unique things. Take the Lead, for example, begs, borrows, and steals from Dangerous Minds, Strictly Ballroom, You Got Served, Music of the Heart, Stand and Deliver, Lean on Me, and any number of ghetto-kids-make-good crowd-pleasers.

Take the Lead stars Antonio Banderas as ballroom instructor Pierre Dulaine, who takes a job overseeing detention at an inner city New York school, teaching a motley crew of multicultural stereotypes the self-affirming joys of ballroom dancing. While the underlying message in movies like this and, say, Coach Carter are well-intentioned - basically, that inner-city strife and racial tension can be alleviated by winning a few basketball games or taking home a rumba trophy - there is also something condescendingly simplistic about such fairy-tale idealism; not only because the endings (usually summarized by titles describing how the characters went on to achieve their illustrious dreams) make sure the audience is no longer concerned with such prescient social issues as they leave the theatre, but also because the characters fall into cliched traps that further highlight the utter artificiality of the plot, despite the fact that they're "inspired by a true story."

At least five times during the first half of Take the Lead, Mr. Dulaine attempts to teach his students ballroom dance over Gershwin or Lena Horne, only to have someone ridiculously switch CDs and say, "Dance to this!" Some piece-of-shit hip-hop song begins to blare, the students all begin to shout and dance in the way only stereotypical movie characters would, and Antonio Banderas shakes his well-coiffed head in dismay. Then he and his students get an idea - why don't we play these ballroom songs over a hip-hop beat! Brilliant! Except that's the infusion of musical styles, eras, and cultures on which hip-hop was built, and the greatest producers have been creating such musical reinvention for about thirty years now. Take the Lead seems to think its mixture of yesterday's music and today's hip-hop culture is something revolutionary, which points out its disrespect for the hip-hop legacy it purports to celebrate. (The complete lack of any good hip-hop music in the film is testament to this as well.)

Liz Friedlander, the director, previously worked on music videos for Blink 182, Babyface, 3 Doors Down, and others, which is hardly a surprise - Take the Lead has the shallow glitz and lazy storytelling of any mediocre music video. What must be a new development, though, is her abbreviated moralizing, which, again, is hardly anything new for this type of message movie. Several times throughout the film, one character says, "I just don't think I'm made for dancing," to which another character replies, "Do you like to dance?" "Yeah," mumbles the first character. "Then you were made for dancing." Such simplistic idealism epitomizes Take the Lead, and similar messages have been espoused so gratuitously in hundreds of other similar films that we need something more. We're used to such inspirational slogans; we should also be aware that, realistically, all of the issues plaguing these characters can't be solved by such after-school-special taglines. Is it too much to ask of a Hollywood crowd-pleaser that, when it portrays a gang of troubled inner-city youths plagued by racism, economic oppression, social indifference, and crime, that it at least take them seriously?

0.5 of 5

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