After other summer documentary surprises “March of the Penguins” and “The Aristocrats” comes “Mad Hot Ballroom,” which has been traveling the festival and art-house circuit since April and debuts this week at the Orpheum. This film focuses on a unique program introduced to New York City’s public elementary schools in which students learn ballroom dancing in preparation for a citywide competition. It’s clear from the film that this program offers New York kids-some of whom are quite disadvantaged-a distinctive, creative outlet and a good way to get past boy-girl social awkwardness. What is not clear is why an entire hour-and-a-half movie should be devoted to it. Despite the positive things the ballroom dancing program provides, it is not profound enough to merit a feature-length film.
Director Marilyn Agrelo focused on elementary schools in three very different neighborhoods: Washington Heights, Bensonhurst and Tribeca. The ballroom teachers are interviewed at length, as are the kids, who tend to say-well, pretty much what you expect kids to say. A lot of the interviews are done in a format emphasizing kids’ thoughts on life in general, what they want to be when they grow up, what they think about the opposite sex, and so on.
It’s an understandable attempt to give the audience a picture of where they are coming from as they all enter the ballroom dancing program together, but after a while it gets tiresome and uninteresting. That’s not to discredit the kids for being who they are; it’s just that there isn’t a compelling reason to put them onscreen talking about these simple things over and over.
Agrelo makes another mistake by barely attempting to illuminate individual kids’ personalities in-depth, or focus on a few so the audience can relate to at least some of them. Instead, she goes for a shotgun approach, throwing in comments from an enormous pool of interviewees in an order that doesn’t seem to follow any logic. At one point, a boy says, “I like a girl named Melissa Rodriguez.”
There is an immediate cut, and naturally one might think a clip featuring Melissa Rodriguez would come next. It doesn’t. If Melissa Rodriguez came onscreen during this film, the audience did not know it, because in addition to this dearth of logic, Agrelo also rarely identified the children by name.
This isn’t the only slipshod editing in “Mad Hot Ballroom.” The schools prepare for and reach their semi-final competitions, which are not the same (Bensonhurst being in Brooklyn as opposed to the others in Manhattan). Rather than meshing the semi-final segments, which would have preserved a natural emotional arc among the three schools’ journeys, Agrelo makes the unconscionable decision of presenting Bensonhurst’s build-up, competition and denouement, all before the beginning of the Manhattan schools’ build-up. This fairly shocking breech of elementary plot construction makes the next semi-final feel repetitive and tedious. Worse, the story itself begins to seriously lose steam as it reaches the end. The film’s inevitable conclusion is touching, but frankly predictable to the point that the audience doesn’t feel like it needs to be watching.
This is the type of subject that would be nice as a magazine article, but as a movie, it just doesn’t hold up.
