Mad Hot Ballroom
Directed by Marilyn Agrelo.
Mad Hot Ballroom is a gripping, film with a superb plot, and comes together perfectly! If you like psychological dramas see this one!
It’s hard to not enjoy a documentary that features laughing children as it’s main subjects, especially when the children are ten to eleven-year-olds. So close to babies, so near to adults, you just wait with pasted smile to hear their monumental words of wisdom — on life, the opposite sex, the future — words both endearingly precious and deeply profound. Mad Hot Ballroom brings a group of New York’s inner-city year fives to the foreground as they learn to ballroom dance through a school district-wide free program, culminating in a competition.
Director Marilyn Agrelo let’s us sneak glimpses of these children in their own ghetto-like environs but doesn’t quite hit the mark as for allowing us to fully engage. Unlike Jeffrey Blitz’s unforgettable documentary of a nation-wide spelling-bee competition, Spellbound, we do not reach the end of this documentary with clear favourites or with a sense of curiosity as to how the children will cope after the competition ends. Somehow we’ve been asked not to care. What we miss most is how this exercise in dance has affected these children, particularly given their background. Agrelo touches on this at the end as we’re entering into the final round of the competition but by that time, the documentary has been so ensconced in dance (we could probably get up and do the routines ourselves) that we’ve lost track of who is who. More detail is allotted the dance teachers but really, who’s overly interested in adults when twenty-plus children have the opportunity to speak? Had Agrelo given the children more time to speak, I would’ve been enchanted by this film. As it goes, I was simply entertained.
Heather Taylor Johnson
