Directed by: Herbert Ross.
Written by: Arthur Laurents.
Starring: Anne Bancroft (Emma), Shirley MacLaine (Deedee), Tom Skerritt (Wayne), Mikhail Baryshnikov (Yuri), Leslie Browne (Emilia), Martha Scott (Adelaide), Antoinette Sibley (Sevilla Haslam), Alexandra Danilova (Madame Dahkarova), Starr Danias (Carolyn), Marshall Thompson (Carter), James Mitchell (Michael), Daniel Levans (Arnold), Scott Douglas (Freddie Romoff), Lisa Lucas (Janina), Phillip Saunders (Ethan), Jurgen Schneider (Peter).
Herbert Ross’ The Turning Point is a movie about
ballet that has very little to offer audiences except for some absolutely
gorgeous dance numbers. But unlike the two best dramatic movies about ballet I
have ever seen – Powell and Pressburger’s The Red Shoes (1948) and Darren
Aronofsky’s Black Swan (2010) the dance scenes are not fully integrated into
the story. Both of those other films had dances sequences that were
thematically relevant to the rest of the movie – that enhanced the story and the
themes. In The Turning Point, as good as the ballet scenes are, they are standalone
highlights. The story, which is clichéd and not very interesting to begin with,
is stopped cold every time people begin to dance.
The movie is about two former rivals, one of whom went
on to become the biggest star in America’s best ballet company, the other got
pregnant, left the company and has spent the past 18 years being a wife, mother
and small town dance teacher. They are brought together once again when the
ballet company comes to Oklahoma City, where the wife and mother, lives. To be
nice, they let her oldest daughter practice with the company – and when it
becomes clear that she is really a star in the making, they invite her to join.
So mother and daughter head off to New York for the summer – but whose dream
they are really pursuing is not really clear.
Anne Bancroft plays Emma, the woman who went onto
become the biggest ballet star in America. But like all ballerinas, her shelf
life is limited – and she is already well past her best before date. She was
celebrated for years, but the truth in ballet, like any profession based on
physical prowess, is that eventually, your career will come to an end. Shirley
Maclaine is Deedee, Emma’s one time rival, who has spent the past two decades
wondering if she could have become Emma had she not gotten pregnant before the
company decided which one of the two of them would play the lead in Anna Karenina
– because she left, Emma’s path was unobstructed. But could Deedee have been
that famous. And now that her daughter Emilia (Leslie Browne) has been invited
to join the company, can she do what her mother could not? And will Emma, who
is now too old to be a star ballet dancer, and too old to become a mother, try
and become a mother to Emilia to try and remain relevant? And is Yuri (Mikhail
Baryshnokov), the young, beautiful, womanizing Russian star of the company,
really interested in Emilia, or does he just want to make her another of her
conquests?
The Turning Point holds the undistinguished honor to
be the most nominated film in Oscar history (11 nominations) not to win a
single Oscar, which raises the question if the Academy really loved the film,
or if it was a film they thought they were supposed to love. The tone of The
Turning Point is all over the map. I could never quite tell if the film was
trying to be a modern (for the 1970s) portrait of women breaking out of their
traditional roles, or just a campy, old fashioned catfight film. There are
elements of both. The marriage between Deedee and Wayne (Tom Skeritt) is
troubled, but given a modern treatment – one that realizes that sometimes
things can break down temporarily, that both can be flawed, but that they want
to stay together. And the portrait of Emma is one where she made the choice to
follow the career she loves instead of having a family, and wondering if she
made the right decision. But then again, there are moments where the two rivals
literally get catty with each other – the climax is a catfight between the two
of them that feels completely out of place. Had the filmmakers embraced one
tone or another – a modern, feminist film, or an old fashioned campy catfight,
the film could have worked. Because it tried to do both, it didn’t.
Then there is the question of the youngsters. Both
Baryshnokov and Browne were nominated for their supporting performances,
despite the fact that both are quite simply awful in all of their dramatic
scenes. Yes, they are beautiful dancers, but their dramatic story completely
and totally falls flat. There is simply no emotion there.
Overall, I kept waiting for The Turning Point to
settle into its story, and it never quite does. It tries too hard to do too
much, and as a result, the film left me unsatisfied. Yes, the dancing is
beautiful, but there needs to be more to the film than just that to make The
Turning Point into a good movie.
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