The Honoraries: Rowlands in Six Dance Lessons
Friday, November 6, 2015 at 12:30PM 
For the next week we'll be celebrating all three of the Honorary Oscar Recipients at TFE. Here's Manuel talking about Gena Rowlands' most recent screen outing.
Whenever we do retrospectives for actresses or directors, I always have the opposite impulse that such an endeavor necessitates. Rather than wanting to go as further back as I can in someone’s filmography, or as higher up as I can in their approved canon, I tend to want to revisit later, more often than not forgotten, works. That’s what I did for our Ingrid Bergman centennial when I watched Cactus Flower and what I did this time around as we celebrate Gena Rowlands, choosing the recent Six Dance Lessons in Six Weeks.
While earlier films bristle with the promise of future success, and classics merely reaffirm those initial inklings, later films can offer a chance to evaluate a performer’s career trajectory. What to make, then, of a film as ineptly if earnestly made as Six Dance Lessons in Six Weeks?
Rowlands plays an retired woman living in Florida who hires a personal dance instructor (Cheyenne Jackson) who happens to be a wise-cracking ’mo who has no time for her upitty bittyness (the film’s words, not mine). The elderly Southern belle and the sassy gay man will, of course, butt heads and eventually grow fond of one another. Thus, much of the enjoyment of the piece is supposed to come from their crackling repartee. Sadly, it’s not really there. Or it’s there, in spurts. Much of this has to do with Jackson, who doesn’t have a handle on his character but then the script so relishes tone-shifting, I’m surprised the actor didn’t get whiplash just keeping up!
“If you say your age out loud your face can hear you.”
Try as Rowlands might - and lord knows she gives Lily a melancholy the film doesn’t deserve - she’s strapped to a script that replays the same beats in every new dance lesson, like a sitcom that prefers to rehash funny quips and catch-phrases over any sustained adherence to the rhythm of real people’s interactions that move forward.
Given the spatial and temporal constraints of the piece, it’s pretty obvious the material began as a play. It's what had Nat so excited about the property back in 2013! (though before we saw the hideous poster for it) Director Arthur Allan Seidelman and screenwriter Richard Alfieri, adapting his own play, have gone to great lengths to “open” the piece, including writing throwaway characters for Jacki Weaver (!) and Rita Moreno (!!) which should really be some sort of crime.
By the time the film finds Lily and Michael getting beyond their stock characters, the Thematic Monologues and Moral Takeaways begin to pile on so quickly, one wonders what led Rowlands to take the role in the first place (she allegedly took over once Ann Margret bowed out). It reads like a meaty role for the stage, but it’s much too hazily sketched to work on screen. That Seidelman privileges those slow close-up zooms that have become shorthand for bad melodramas, means any attempt at subtlety on the part of the actress gets lost in fussy camerawork.
Perhaps, I should atone for this choice and seek out one of her Oscar-nominated roles instead?
Reader Comments (8)
I am A HUGE fan of Rowland, & her 2 Oscar nom performence are very good. But to me her best performence (and that is saying a lot when you look at her stellar career) is in the lesser none "Opening Night" (Which Almodovar homage in the car accident scene in "All about my mother. So you now if Almodovar make a homage to a movie... need I say more?)
agree with this post. I wanted to support this film but it really did feel amateurish. I love Cheyenne Jackson but I absolutely agree that he had trouble with this character. Hollywood too often obsesses over "likeability" but in gentle two-handers like this, you absolutely need it and his character is such an asshole for half the movie, and he doesn't counteract the script in that way which is a pity.
the flashback stuff was the worst though.
p.s. GENA ROWLANDS was at the Angelina Jolie premiere last night and I congratulated her on her honroary Oscar !
Nat - you talked to her!!! What did she say? Probably just "thank you" but can you make something up to make this story even better?
you fucking talked to gena fucking rowlands????
Manuel, go see any of her Cassavetes movie. She was fantastic in every single one of them, and in three of them, absolutely transcendental - A Woman Under the Influence, Opening NIght and, yea, in Love Streams, who happens to be Cassavetes' masterpiece.
Seeing a great actress handle a bad script and a mediocre director is one way to test the appeal of a legend, but not really the best way IMHO.
Why not try "Gloria" or "Woman Under the Influence" - give yourself a chance to see what the fuss is about. Besides not seeing the classics just seems like self-deprivation for no good reason. Pleasure isn't a bad thing.
2-Time Nominee? With her filmography, it should be more like 2-Time WINNER, with 6 nominations overall (easily).
I suggest Unhook the Stars and Another Woman.