Take the Lead movie review & film summary (2006)

Public manners have degenerated in recent decades. It is now routine to hear obscenities shouted in public, and by all sorts of people, not just in traffic but even in Starbucks. I am as fond of colorful language as anyone, but I try not to inflict it upon strangers. I suspect many people sense they should have better manners, and need only a nudge. In high school, I was addressed for the first time in my life as "Mister Ebert" by Stanley Hynes, an English teacher, and his formality transformed his classroom into a place where a certain courtliness prevailed.

In "Take the Lead," Banderas plays Pierre Dulaine, a Manhattan ballroom dancing instructor who rides the streets, impeccably dressed, on his bicycle. One day, he witnesses a student named Rock (Rob Brown) attacking a teacher's car with a golf club. Rock has his reasons, but never mind; instead of calling the cops, Dulaine walks into the school the next day and announces to the principal (Alfre Woodard) that he wants to teach ballroom dancing to the detention class.

She is a take-charge realist who walks the hallways ordering students to take off their hats, pull up their pants and remove their hands from the netherlands of others, and her impulse is to laugh at Pierre, or throw him out. But he prevails and walks into the detention hall, where the students regard him as a visitor from the moon. They resist him, but he fascinates them, especially when he brings in one of his sexiest ballroom colleagues to show them what is surely true, that the tango is more manly, more feminine, more sexy and more plain damn hot than any other form of motion requiring clothes.

Having seen the charming documentary "Mad Hot Ballroom" (2005) about New York grade school kids learning to dance, I anticipated the general direction of "Take the Lead." It is not a particularly original movie and lacks the impact of such earlier classroom parables as "Stand and Deliver," "Lean on Me," "Mr. Holland's Opus" and the similar "Music of the Heart." The vulgar, rebellious, resentful, potentially criminal students are transformed by dancing as surely as music transforms the hero of "Hustle & Flow." And of course the film ends in a ballroom dancing competition, with full-court choreography that in real life takes weeks of rehearsal but in the movies springs spontaneously from the souls of the dancers.

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