BY ABGRABER

In print | Published October 21, 2004

The first rule of Miss Mitzi’s School of Dance: You do not talk about Miss Mitzi’s School of Dance. The second rule of Miss Mitzi’s School of Dance: You do not talk about Miss Mitzi’s School of Dance.

Why? Beats me. Maybe the writers thought it would create tension or something. How sorely they were mistaken.

At first glance, John Clark, the protagonist of “Shall We Dance?”, seems like prime meat for the dark underground ruled by Tyler Durden of 1998’s “Fight Club.” He’s a corporate nobody working a death-related job (Clark helps people write wills), numb to the blandness of existence. Cue some pounding techno music, and we’ve got a new member of Project Mayhem. But instead of techno, we get the twang of the world’s smallest violin, playing the world’s saddest song just for John. “Shall We Dance?” occupies a peculiar space in the Hollywoodiverse as a sort of polar opposite to “Fight Club.” It seems that unhappy white men with morbid white-collar jobs have two options in the movies: They can pound people’s heads in abandoned parking garages, or they can morph into Fred Astaire. Unfortunately for Richard Gere, the former is much more interesting.

Luckily, “Shall We Dance?” doesn’t actually attempt to interest the audience. Leave that serious stuff for the Oscar hopefuls. Rather, the object of “Shall We Dance?” is to make Gere look as suavely debonair as possible and to make Jennifer Lopez look slightly uncomfortable but simultaneously as gorgeously unattainable as possible. Here, at least, the movie thoroughly succeeds. The plot is more of a mechanism to achieve these transparent ends rather than an attempt to make the movie watchable in itself. It’s so straightforward that it deserves only monosyllabic words. Gere plays John. John is bored. Dance looks like fun. John wants to dance. John joins Miss Mitzi’s School of Dance. Dance, John, dance.

The dancing itself is passable, at times (okay, once) even powerful, but not strong enough to float an entire film, especially not one approaching the two-hour mark. Where the script called for strong characters to bypass the bland plot, writer Audrey Wells gave us Jennifer Lopez. She plays Paulina, one of John’s instructors who is still broken up over breaking up with her boyfriend and dance partner the previous year. Played continuously on the verge of collapse, Paulina is snivelly and unsympathetic. She’s onscreen only when John is and never develops much of a separate personality. The same goes for most of the secondary characters in this film: You learn as much about them as you would about real-life ballroom dancers by watching them on ESPN.

Though “Shall We Dance?” is a romance, you may be surprised by the lovers. We are spared a tritely adulterous liaison between Paulina and John. Instead, the real love affair is between John, Paulina and dance itself, for which Wells deserves some credit. She identifies John and Paulina as kindred souls through their passion for their art, not for each other. Gere’s lust for ballroom, not booty, keeps his character likable and allows the film a margin of deviation into more original territory than is usually cinematically explored with such simple characters.

But there ends the story’s worthiness. Instead of growing organically from the script, problems arising in “Shall We Dance?” are imposed upon the characters by writers desperate to bring emotional tautness into a fairy tale. John doesn’t tell his wife (Susan Sarandon) that he’s taking dance lessons. His secrecy upsets her, and she creates a superfluous subplot by hiring a private investigator to spy on her husband. John’s motivation for this sort of secrecy is vague at best, but at least it makes someone in the film conflicted, even if it’s only a secondary character. In a stunning plot twist — oh, how I wish I could finish this sentence and maintain journalistic integrity — the rest of the film moves from A to B like Elvis making a beeline for a fried peanut-butter and banana sandwich. Nothing gets in the way, and no momentary worry stops Jennifer Lopez from looking gorgeous or Richard Gere from looking suave.

A show without tension in a world without problems, “Shall We Dance?” is pure escapist fare. It exists in a lot of universes, none of which intersect with reality. There’s the fantasyverse, where every family’s kids look like they belong in a modeling contest and sons ask their fathers to bars to meet their new girlfriends. There’s the glitzverse, where amateur dancers perform beautiful routines under the stress of competition. With neither the personal force nor the dynamic story necessary to forge a bond with reality, “Shall We Dance?” is dancing on thin ice.

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