The new Footloose settles for a nearly scene-by-scene narrative retelling and at times a frame-by-frame recreation of the dance sequences from the original. Only the ugly new narrow-mindedness against the South and straw man arguments against the growing menace of Presbyterian totalitarians have been revised to reinforce modern prejudice. Nonetheless, some missing dance moments at the movie’s end stand out.
Kenny Wormald in Footloose.
In 1984, with Hollywood already playing catch-up to the music video culture beginning to hustle into popular consciousness, old-school Brooklynite director Herb Ross (to whom the remake is dedicated) used the delayed gratification of the prom dance finale to survey contemporary dance moves, introducing some never-before seen ringers in the movie: a remarkably boneless robot dancer; a Latino-coded, suspendered, Russian-influenced gymnastic kicker; a whirling blond throwing her heavy chest around; and line dancing belatedly influenced by Travolta in Urban Cowboy. Still, none of the dancing carried the thrill of Ross’ Pennies from Heaven (1980), when both Steve Martin and Christopher Walken demonstrated Depression-era dance styles with élan and nerve.
Despite casting leads with professional dance backgrounds—the Sal Mineo-coifed Kenny Wormald and Julianne Hough as Ren and Ariel—new Footloose director Craig Brewer repeats the largely editorial trickery of Kevin Bacon’s angry abandoned warehouse dance (which holds some blame for Billy Elliot), reduces Ariel to strip-pole churning and midriff display and truncates the final scene even further, to the point where viewers may well feel they’ve seen nothing new—as indeed they have not.
A half-century after West Side Story, movies leave the impression that if dance is not dead, it shuffles like a zombie—and not one from “Thriller.” In the new Footloose, Ariel’s deflowering by a car-racing cad comes before Ren’s influence on her and the remarkably unfettered underground Gomorrah of Bomont, Ga. The symbolic fertility rite essence of dance has been displaced from pre- to post-seduction, with Ren lecturing Ariel on the trap of empty sex as rebellion, after which “the sweat’s gonna dry and you’re still going to feel like shit.” Now, shall we dance?
In movies like last year’s Step Up 3D, moves bear little relation to the modernized step dancing of Southern college folk tradition. Instead, it’s more of the same: robot/mime (which modern choreographers still use to express the dehumanization of us Metropolis automatons), dusty Michael Jackson moves (lead dancer Adam Sevani even looks like Harpo Marx meets M.J. through Michael Cera) and an almost impossibly abnormal hip-hop athleticism, head spins and chest bumps invoking the aggressive black street gestures that traverse African masculinity to the martial arts mat.
During these solo muscular displays, women are practically irrelevant except as spectators. Even when equal time forces their turn on the floor, they come off as wan imitators, girls throwing footballs. This makes movie dance seem, irony of ironies, as chauvinistic as the tribal rites in Once Were Warriors, as antisocial as striptease. And thus does dance divorce romance.
