Richard Gere is a likable husband to Susan Sarandon, bored with his mundane job as a lawyer (funny he just played a dancing lawyer in “Chicago”). Every night his subway train rails by a dance studio that’s lit in neon. Finally getting the guts to stop in, he meets Miss Paulina, Jennifer Lopez, a professional ballroom teacher. While it’s charming to watch a story of bumbling wanna-be dancers follow a passion we probably wish we’d have the drive to try, something fails here. While Lopez is refreshing in a backseat, almost quiet role (she’s depressed from a lost love in the film, not real life), she comes off too steel princess and unable to connect to her co-stars, until much too late in the story. At the same time, Gere’s secret passion for dancing, distances our chances of knowing his wife (Sarandon) to the point that she seems like she belongs in another movie (yet she’s such a great actress she massages the role of the concerned wife as best she can). The three leads seem to be dancing solo most of the time, finding passion in their own destiny and inner desires but not giving us a chemistry we yearn for. But it must be said that their dancing talents (especially Lopez) is enough to make you want to rush out and sign up for a Rumba class. Stanley Tucci, is a scream as the nerd who longs to be a Latin God at any disco. If you want to see a really good version of this, there is a film by the same name, same story, with subtitles, about an Asian man caught in the same situation (1996). Rent that. It’s a better er, substitute, dancer.
