Joel on Film

She Dances tells a slightly cluttered story, occasionally uneven in its tonal balance, but the stakes here all reside in a single relationship which, because the movie gets it so right, offsets some of the film’s shortcomings elsewhere by quite a lot. It certainly helps that the relationship in question is between a father and a daughter, who are played by the real-life father/daughter pair of Steve and Audrey Zahn. Folks will obviously recognize the name of the elder Zahn, a character actor among comics, who wisely plays things in a toned-down register for this hybrid of domestic drama and situational comedy.

The younger Zahn, though, deserves to be shot directly into stardom on the basis of this performance, which is so naturally funny and witty that it’s disarming when the actress is eventually called upon to be nakedly vulnerable, only to prove herself adept at that, too. She plays Claire to her dad’s Jason, and together, they believably play a daughter estranged from her father in the months following an unthinkable loss. Jason’s son (and Claire’s brother) died some time ago, though not so long that people are not just now telling Jason how sorry they were to hear of the passing on account of not having seen him since it happened.

Now, in addition to being estranged from each other, Jason is also separated from his wife Deb (Rosemarie DeWitt, underutilized but, to the degree she appears here, still good), and the odd way that the members of this family duck around the topic of the absent family member speaks volumes about how much he meant to them and how vital his presence was as an anchor. One strength of this screenplay, written by the elder Zahn and director Rick Gomez, is that it finds each of the family members in sort of a different head space. Deb, in her brief time onscreen, establishes that she just doesn’t like to talk about her son.

Jason and Claire are not that far removed from a similar desire to avoid talking about him, but they express it in slightly different ways. In an early moment, a young woman with a tangential connection to Claire tells Jason that she graduated with his son and, like a lot of others here, takes the time to tell him how sorry she is. His answer is to deflect by commenting, quite pointedly, that he remembers her by her connection to Claire.

As for the daughter, she’s come to cope by finding excuses to be almost obnoxiously cheery about everything, except when annoyance arrives, and to lose herself in her dance, which has gotten her to the point of tryouts for a major competition just a few days away. A confluence of unlucky accidents—mostly one involving an unseen grandmother, who has fallen off a roof in pursuit of a cat—places Claire in the care of Jason, who must now chaperone the trip for his underage daughter in the place of Deb. An unspoken but—by the expression in a couple of these faces—haunting truth right in front of them is the fact that the absent son could have once been that very chaperone.

That covers most of the dramatic stuff, which leaves the sitcom material to the road trip had by Jason, Claire and Claire’s best friend Kat (Mackenzie Ziegler). The exploits are slightly amusing, especially a bit upon arrival when Jason is flatly unable to locate the ballroom where the dance contestants are practicing, but sort of a distraction from the main story. That’s also true of a rivalry that develops between Claire and another dancer, whose own dad is a weird Russian stereotype out of nowhere. Thankfully, we also get a minor supporting turn from Sonequa Martin-Green as Jamie, the overtly helpful and unnaturally calm dance instructor for the girls.

The story sort of meanders through the process of getting Claire onstage for rehearsals and, finally, the actual dance, but once we reach that, the sequence is something special, as Claire pulls from an obviously personal place to bring down the house. Elsewhere, Jason also has to prepare for the sale of the company he owns with Brian (Ethan Hawke), a transaction that has its roots in something Jason has not prepared to confront. A suggestion of what, exactly, that something is resides in an absolutely heartbreaking scene between the two men in which Hawke, until then sort of an odd choice for such a generally absent role, thoroughly earns his appearance.

Yes, She Dances might be a little messy in the department of trying to meld its disparate tones (another example is a trio of ditzy stage moms, who are handsy with the men they find attractive but who just simply don’t fit here). Life, though, is a little bit messy, and this movie is a good one about good people trying their best.

Rating: *** (out of ****)