"Marilyn Hotchkiss": One, two, three actors make the right moves

Randall Miller's "Marilyn Hotchkiss Ballroom Dancing & Charm School," expanded from a 1990 short film of the same title, is clearly a labor of love. There's a wistful, gentle quality to it — a sense that this movie is someone's careful dream come true. And while it's at times too melodramatic and formulaic to be entirely successful, it still holds some appeal; its very amateurishness is what makes it charming. (Likewise, the dancing in the film is enjoyable, even as it isn't very good; there's a real-people vibe to it.)

Taking place in three different time periods, Miller's story centers on a young widower named Frank (Robert Carlyle), a baker haunted by memories. While making deliveries, he stops to help at a car wreck and meets Steve (John Goodman), a dying man determined to fulfill a promise made 40 years ago: to meet the childhood love of his life, Lisa, that evening at Marilyn Hotchkiss Ballroom Dancing & Charm School.

Movie review

Showtimes and trailer

"Marilyn Hotchkiss Ballroom Dancing & Charm School," with Robert Carlyle, Marisa Tomei, Mary Steenburgen, Donnie Wahlberg, John Goodman, Sean Astin. Written and directed by Randall Miller. 103 minutes. Not rated; for mature audiences. Egyptian.

Listening to Steve's story, Frank agrees to go to the school and try to find Lisa. While he doesn't find her until quite late in the film (when she is, to no one's surprise, very different from what he expects), he does find the pleasure of ballroom dancing and the infectious smile of a woman named Meredith (Marisa Tomei), who just might be able to help Frank move into a new chapter of his own life.

For a story that's at heart very simple, the screenplay's structure seems unnecessarily complicated: We keep zooming into the future (Frank at the dance school) and the past (Steve's childhood), then returning to the present (the accident scene). And the movie seems to have a few too many characters, with nearly everyone at Frank's widower support group given a bit of a story line.

Perhaps Miller, in blowing up a short film to feature-length, may have stretched things out a bit too much (the same happened with the Naomi Watts film "Ellie Parker" last year); you can see the bones of a lovely short version of "Marilyn Hotchkiss" here, amid the clutter.

But a number of the actors shine. The pale Carlyle, a Scot who doesn't attempt an American accent (making Frank seem all the more alienated), lets us see his character slowly waking up, with the too-often-underrated Tomei quite touching as the woman who helps him. There's something sad in Meredith's wide, tremulous smile, which is what pulls Frank in.

Mary Steenburgen, given the rather odd role of Marilyn Hotchkiss' daughter Marienne, who's been running the dance school since her mother's death, does something remarkable: She makes you wish the film were more about her. Marienne speaks in an elegantly modulated tone, with something brittle underneath it — this woman knows more than she's telling about the complicated business of being a teacher of adults. But within the perfectly groomed and carefully controlled Marienne, there's just a hint of abandon.

"Dance," she breathes at one point, "is a very powerful drug" — and we realize that within "Marilyn Hotchkiss" there's more than one kind of love story.

Moira Macdonald: 206-464-2725 or mmacdonald@seattletimes.com