Emile Ardolino (1987)
It’s become an entertainment brand over the years. Strange seeing it now for the first time now (on television – presumably as a tribute to Patrick Swayze, who died last month) – and finding it so small. (It’s surprising too that it took the best part of twenty years for Dirty Dancing to be adapted into a stage musical.) This summer-I-grew-to-be-a-woman romance is evidently autobiographical. The Wikipedia entry for the writer Eleanor Bergstein provides a virtual plot synopsis:
‘Bergstein was born in 1938 in Brooklyn, New York. She has one older sister Frances. Their father was a Jewish doctor, leaving much of the care of the girls to their mother Sarah Bergstein. The family spent summers in the luxury resorts of the Catskill Mountains and while her parents were golfing Bergstein was dancing. She was a teenaged Mambo queen, competing in local “Dirty dancing” competitions and during university she worked as a dance instructor at Arthur Murray dance studios.’
Bergstein’s date of birth makes her setting the story in 1963 – weeks before her alter ego Baby (real name Frances) Houseman starts college – more striking than it already seemed to me watching the picture. Whenever a film is set in America in the summer of 1963, I always think: that’s just before Kennedy’s assassination. (This applied even to Brokeback Mountain.) Baby’s voiceover at the start of Dirty Dancing, as the family arrive at the resort, reminds us anyway that ‘This was before the President was shot, before the Beatles …’ Towards the end of the film, the resort owner Max Kellerman confides to the resident bandleader that he fears the days of holidays like this – teenage kids accompanying their parents – are numbered. His concerns are almost immediately obliterated by the happy ending, which sees everyone in the hall where Kellerman’s annual talent show has been taking place dancing to ‘(I’ve Had) The Time of My Life’, the film’s signature tune. ‘(I’ve Had)’ makes no attempt to sound like a 1963 song. It’s a generic-sounding number for an emotionally uplifting 1980s film and emulated its close relations and ancestors (‘Up Where We Belong’, ‘Flashdance – What A Feeling’, ‘Take My Breath Away’) by winning an Oscar. The combined effect of that song – which sounded like a thing of the recent past even when the film was released – and of the holidaymakers of all ages joining in the dance as it plays is rather brilliant. It collapses the historical setting of Dirty Dancing but at the same time sustains a vague but undeniable nostalgic feel to the piece.
Emile Ardolino’s background was in choreography (and documentaries about dancers) and the dancing is good to watch – although the ‘dirty’ dancing is so tidily performed that it seems pretty wholesome. But the film isn’t as crudely and easily entertaining as I’d hoped – I struggled to keep awake in order to get to the enjoyable silly climax. Eleanor Bergstein’s script is formulaic and her characters are crudely written but Ardolino directs much of the piece as if it was naturalistic drama. The benefit of that is a fair amount of acting that’s more loose and natural than you might expect. But the script remains just a formula (autobiography doesn’t make any difference to that) so the discretion of the players seems pointless. Even so, I ended up feeling oddly pleased that Dirty Dancing – which lacks the brightly-coloured cheesiness of a Grease – was such a hit. It’s not surprising that Jennifer Grey hasn’t gone on to do much else. She was probably too miniaturist for leading roles and too conventional for character parts. But I really liked her as Baby: she’s a truthful performer and believable as a serious student-to-be, as well as a nice dancer. (This is in the genes: she’s Joel Grey’s daughter.) As Johnny, the professional dancer who brings out the woman in Baby on the dance floor and in the bedroom, Patrick Swayze is completely credible playing someone in his twenties, even though he was in his mid-thirties at the time. He’s not convincing in any respect as an emotionally raw working-class boy who’s come to believe people when they tell him he’s no good. Swayze isn’t a bad actor but he lacks nuance and friction. Since he’s an impressively strong dancer and looks good, that hardly matters here.
Jane Brucker is Baby’s dreary sister, Jerry Orbach her doctor father and Kelly Bishop her mother. (Although she seems neatly acquiescent through most of the film, you sense an underlying goer – when Mrs Houseman joins in the final dance it’s something of a payoff.) With Cynthia Rhodes as Johnny’s usual dancing partner (their lack of any other kind of relationship is strangely under-explained), Robbie Gould as the prattish medical student on a holiday job at the resort who gets her pregnant, and Jack Weston as the resort owner.
2 October 2009
