Film’s stars ‘Step Up,’ but movie itself doesn’t

In theaters

STEP UP, directed by Anne Fletcher; written by Duane Adler and Melissa Rosenberg, 98 minutes, rated PG-13.

Stripped of surprises and coasting on cliches, the new Anne Fletcher movie, “Step Up,” pins much of its hopes on its two leads – former model Channing Tatum, whose Tyler Gage is a Baltimore tough with a hard-knock, hip-hop life, and Jenna Dewan, whose Nora is a well-to-do dancer finishing her senior year at the Maryland School for the Arts.

Essentially, it’s up to these two to generate whatever interest and tension the movie has, which isn’t much; Fletcher presses each actor with the burden of making something out of nothing. Assisting her in that task is Duane Adler (“Save the Last Dance”) and Melissa Rosenberg, whose script is so rote, it’s difficult not to watch this movie wondering how a film about taking risks could be so unwilling to take a few of its own.

But it doesn’t.

The movie begins with Tyler and his posse – homeboy Mac (Damaine Radcliff) and Mac’s younger brother, Skinny (De’Shawn Washington) – spending their days shooting hoops and getting into trouble, while at night they hit the clubs, where Tyler reveals on the dance floor that he can get crunk with the best of them.

It’s during one of their wayward nights on the town that the trio breaks into the arts school. There, they half-heartedly trash a classroom before Tyler is caught and sentenced to 200 hours of community service. He will become a janitor at the school, mopping floors and scrubbing toilets in an effort to right his wrongs.

Enter Nora, who is so focused on succeeding at her upcoming senior showcase, that she’s stunned – stunned! – when her dance partner hurts his ankle in a dance misstep and is presumably out of commission. Now what is Nora to do? Who is going to step up to the plate at the last moment to help her out? Could it be that it’s Tyler, the smoldering new janitor with the fly bod, low self-esteem and hot parking-lot dance moves? Quicker than you can cinch a ballerina into a tutu, that’s just the case, with Nora and Tyler learning each other’s moves before bringing a mix of them onto the stage.

Swirling around them are a haze of restless subplots. There’s Nora’s rigid mother, Kathleen (Deirdre Lovejoy), who would prefer that her daughter go to an Ivy League school rather than risk a career path that could lead to, say, a smoky room and a cold pole. There’s the school’s tense headmistress (Rachel Griffiths, awful), who may or may not let Tyler in as a full student. And there are of course the personal hardships Tyler and Nora must work through if they are to become what they’re destined to become – a couple.

For the movie – and audiences – the good news is that both Tatum and Dewan are just enough to best the bum script. They are likeable, their dance talent is undeniable, and their modest chemistry goes some way in lifting the movie above the mediocrity it otherwise courts.

Grade: C+

On DVD

THE PIANIST, directed by Roman Polanski, written by Ronald Harwood, 149 minutes, rated R.

Perhaps only Roman Polanski could have pulled off “The Pianist,” a blunt, unflinching masterwork that exposes a harrowing corner of the Holocaust, strips it bare of sentiment and offers an unnerving meditation on the horror of war and on one man’s fight for survival.

Just re-released by Universal in a new print, the film stands as a timely reminder from Polanski, a Polish Jew who experienced the Holocaust firsthand as a 7-year-old boy in the Krakow ghetto. It was there that Polanski’s parents were ripped from him by the Germans, divided and taken to separate concentration camps (his father survived but his mother was gassed at Auschwitz), and where Polanski himself learned the terror of dodging German gunfire as he made his own daring escape through a barbed-wire fence and into a ruined world he no longer knew.

If surviving that experience gave Polanski the crucial insight necessary to tell the story of Wladyslaw Szpilman (Adrien Brody), one of Poland’s premiere composers and pianists, then it’s the unique worldview and human perspective he culled from that experience that makes “The Pianist” so utterly personal and, at the same time, so coldly detached.

Winner of three Academy Awards, the film opens in 1939 with the 27-year-old Szpilman playing a Chopin nocturne for a Polish radio station when Nazi bombs destroy the studio where he’s performing.

Around him, chaos unfolds as the Nazis dig in for the long haul. But Szpilman and his family believe that the Germans will fail, particularly when it’s announced on radio that France and Britain have declared war on Hitler. The collective sigh of relief that rises up from the Szpilmans is eventually strangled from each as the Jews of Warsaw are herded from their homes by the hundreds of thousands and the film’s real horrors begin.

Horror has always been Polanski’s forte, and so, for the rest of the movie, he holds back nothing, letting loose with a wrenching series of images delivered with a frankness that gives his film such power, it’s often humbling and difficult to watch.

Through all the rubble, death, senseless murder and devastation, Polanski never loses sight of Szpilman’s journey, which is at once physical as he fights to find food and spiritual as his faith – tested time and again by the Nazis – is sustained by the beauty and truth he finds in music.

In the film’s best scene – an instant classic that comes near the movie’s end – all of Szpilman’s rage, exhaustion, frustration and long-repressed passion are flung free when a German officer (Thomas Kretschmann) asks him to play the piano at the house in which Szpilman is hiding. It’s the most poignant, powerful moment caught on film in years and Brody, whose genius performance was indeed the best of 2002, gives it his all, throwing himself into the sublime release of music and allowing us into the internal life of the artist as the artist himself hurls everything he has – everything that’s right with the world and everything that’s left in his soul – straight into the face of madness.

Grade: A+

Visit www.weekinrewind.com, the archive of Bangor Daily News film critic Christopher Smith’s reviews, which appear Mondays in Discovering, Fridays in Happening, and Weekends in Television. He may be reached at Christopher@weekinrewind.com.