Thanks
to the power of television, Shakespearean actor Patrick Stewart is best
known for his role as Captain Jean Luc Picard in Star Trek: The Next Generation.
However, in Let It Be Me, Stewart boldly goes for a different enterprise,
slapping on both an American accent and a white wig to play a homeless
ballroom-dance instructor. According to writer-director Eleanor Bergstein,
Stewart said: "I have such a strong, dominant presence without my hair,
I'd really like to try something else."
While
Let It Be Me might be new territory for Stewart, it marks a return to the
dance floor for Bergstein as she also wrote the wildly successful Dirty
Dancing. Let It Be Me is a romance about an engaged couple who take dance
lessons together. Campbell Scott co-stars with Jennifer Beals, who hasn't
cut the rug on-screen since Flashdance. Yancy Butler and Jamie Goodwin
play the couple who run the "Dance With Me" dance studio and Stewart romances
wealthy widow Leslie Caron (of Gigi fame).
The
film was made in 1995 but its distribution company went bust which didn't
thrill their production company one bit. Now, two years on, they've found
a channel for Let It Be Me to hit the screens.
The
film answers the question what Dying Young's Campbell Scott has been up
to. Having starred opposite Isabella Rossellini in John Schlesinger's Cold
War drama, The Innocent, as well as playing Kyra Sedgwick's boyfriend in
the 1992 Generation X comedy Singles, the last time he was on the big screen
was in 1994 in Mrs.Parker and the Vicious Circle. With all these films
under his belt (as well as having actor George C. Scott and Colleen Dewhurst
for parents), it's a little surprising that Scott hasn't become a bigger
star. These days he seems content to play smaller roles in independent
films, and to work behind the camera, just as he did in The Daytrippers.
Most recently, Scott co-directed - with actor Stanley Tucci - the upcoming
indie Big Night, which was a hit at this year's Sundance Film Festival.
Built
on the kind of spurious events that correspond less to remembrance than
to the halo we sometimes place around memory, Let It Be Me works out to
be a likable, warm little dance fantasy. On a whim, Scott enters the dance
studio to learn a simple dance step to surprise his fiancee (Beals) for
their first dance step at the wedding reception. The lessons Scott learns
are more than he bargains for.
Chief
among them is that Butler is way, way more of a babe than his fiancé.
With her short skirts, fab body and husky voice - not to mention her unbridled,
suggestive body-contact dancing which practically mimes copulation - it's
a wonder how Scott retains the personae of an innocent. Its only when he
realizes that dance instructor/Patrick Swayze look alike, Goodwin and his
fiancé were once an item, that the doubts begin to creep in.
The
movie's dancing is terrific and beautifully controlled, whether performed
by the anonymous "corps de ballet" couples or by the individual protagonists.
Although
Let It Be Me's transformations and compression of time and events are nothing
but the old formula for romances and musicals, they're done enchantingly
- even when further corny melodramatic implausibilities and routine misunderstandings
are tacked on.
