The dilemma facing a film critic when contemplating the new dance documentary Ballet 422 (opening Friday in Bay Area Landmark Theatres) is how to avoid "damning with faint praise." But it's the only honest way I can approach this sincere but uninspiring work from director Jody Lee Lipes. To his credit, Lipes presents a promising situation, a condensed peek behind the scenes as young choreographer Justin Peck, an up-and-coming talent whose work is in demand from dance companies across the country, prepares and rehearses his latest work for the New York City Ballet. I'd be a far happier critic if my task were to judge an exciting new talent like Peck, with his charisma, smoldering dark good looks, and seemingly boundless professional prospects, but I'm here to evaluate the movie. Lipes is attempting a Frederick Wiseman-style, full-immersion baptism into his subject, and he just hasn't produced a dramatically arresting film.
Sitting close to the screen at a press preview, I kept thinking how much a young dance student would benefit from this exposure to the mountaintop of NYC's exciting dance world. Myself, I was still soaring from the sensational West Side Story DVD I watched to prepare for the Castro's one-night revival of perhaps the greatest dance-based movie in American history. Of course, it's unfair to expect Ballet 422 to be as thrilling as West Side Story, but the point is that every film released in a movie theatre at today's admission prices has to offer something more than a little special, something that can't easily be found on our tiny private screens and devices.
There are a few moments when Ballet 422 is interrupted by an arresting behind-the-scenes moment. At one point, the Young Turk in Peck inspires him to risk insulting the New York Ballet orchestra conductor by asking to give a pep talk to the orchestra's musicians, who the young choreographer felt weren't giving it their all. We watch the lanky Peck, still a solo performer, slip into tux and tails for a supremely angsty experience, sitting in the audience as his work unfolds on stage, helpless at this point to do anything to help things along. Ballet 422 is so pitched to these blink-and-you-miss-them beats that you feel like you're on duty and should be getting a check for watching rather than ponying up at the box office.
Years ago I enjoyed watching The Turning Point, in which director Herbert Ross and screenwriter Arthur Laurents deftly framed Mikhail Baryshnikov's film debut with a little hairpulling between actresses Anne Bancroft and Shirley MacLaine. At the time there was some critical tsk-tsking for vulgarizing a moment between two competitive women, and somehow sullying the emerging feminist movement as a result. Years later, I devoured a thin volume about one of my least favorite presidents, My Father at 100 by former Joffrey Ballet dancer Ron Reagan. That this AIDS-era survivor appreciated a loving but not uncritical portrait of "the Gipper" is no small thing. What the young and politically liberal Reagan kid managed was the rare feat of a loving debunking. While fully grasping what provoked and infuriated his dad's critics, Ron managed to show us all what an enigmatic creature "Dutch Reagan" was, even to those who knew him best of all. Young Reagan writes that during a raging brush fire, his dad took time out to inform the son's then-future wife about the history of the family home, "a home, she said with an air of wonderment, he seemed to have forgotten was in danger of burning down around him." A good filmmaker is ultimately a good storyteller, and what the director of Ballet 422 fails to do, unlike Herbert Ross and Ron Reagan, is find his story amidst the smoke and mirrors of a high-pressured New York City art scene, where the slightest move of a leg or a wrist, or the turn of a head, should speak volumes about the civilization that made it possible.
Anyone desiring a richer insight into what a dancer's mind can offer the rest of us should consult former New York City Ballet dancer Christopher d'Amboise's captivating memoir Leap Year: A Year in the Life of a Dancer (Doubleday, 1982); Diane Solway's gripping account of the short, heroic life of a Joffrey dancer dying of AIDS, A Dancer Against Time (Pocket Books, 1994); or Ron Reagan's memoir My Father at 100 (Viking Penquin, 2011).