Rocky Road

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

SLOW DANCING IN THE BIG CITY

Directed by John G. Avildsen

Screenplay by Barra Grant

This movie asks several less than momentous, perhaps risible, questions. Could a figure very like Columnist Jimmy Breslin, the slob-throb voice of New York's little guy, find love and happiness with a young woman cut from the same fine cloth as Dancer Gelsey Kirkland? Can the public be persuaded to accept, as a heartwarming example of the human spirit's indomitability, her triumph over what appear to be terminal leg cramps on opening night of her first starring part in a ballet? Can another big crash-bang score by Bill Conti once again drown out a multitude of dramatic sins and carry this picture to the popular heights achieved by Director Avildsen's most recent work, the ineffable Rocky?

The answer to the first question being yes, the answer to the next must be maybe (or Barnum was right). To the last, it is no; the services asked from Rocky's composer are beyond the call of duty. Just why any young writer should be so cynical in constructing a love story the first time out is hard to fathom. Barra Grant has the dancer (played by Anne Ditchburn of the National Ballet of Canada) move in down the hall from the columnist (Paul Sorvino). There are a number of chance encounters in which she gradually warms to his streetwise but not hardened sensibility, just as he comes to appreciate her strangely withdrawn nature.

Eventually, of course, he discovers that she is ill and trying to hide her affliction from her ballet master, trying to hide, as well, her growing feelings for the writer. He, too, is preoccupied. He almost misses her brief victory over pain and the tough New York audience because he is trying, unsuccessfully, to save a young boy from his evil, heroin-pushing older brother. Finally, the columnist makes it to the theater, just in time to carry Ditchburn onstage for her curtain calls after her legs have given out. It is surely one of the most embarrassingly heartwarming climaxes in movie history, but somehow appropriate to a movie that would have been too sentimental and preposterous even for Louis B. Mayer.

As usual in Avildsen's work, the direction is on the nose, with no discomfiting originality to disturb audiences. The veteran Sorvino knows enough to be somewhat hangdog about what he is called upon to do, but Ditchburn is too new to the game to be even slightly humiliated by all this nonsense. They meet somewhere in the middle of mediocrity to form their little ensemble. It is a measure of just how careless the raptures of cynicism are that Avildsen tries to pass off an ancient Newark concert hall as Lincoln Center, which it in no way resembles. Of course, if you attempt to foist off a romance as silly as this one, developing it in a totally banal fashion, then you must believe that the public will accept almost anything. Given Rocky's record, this is an understandable belief, but one rather expects Slow Dancing's performance at the box office may shatter it.

Richard Schickel

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