REVIEW: Ballet is the Star in Otherwise Uninspired Mao's Last Dancer

Hyper-earnest and less than half good, Mao's Last Dancer puts a biopic gloss on a bumpy journey, that traveled by Chinese ballet dancer Li Cunxin from Maoist China to the Houston Ballet Company in the early 1980's. That gloss, a product of director Bruce Beresford's constitutional timidity toward his more provocatively chosen subjects, hardens to a kind of reflective coat that is worn most glaringly by the film's protagonist. By the end of 117 minutes we know the big-ticket plot points and that Li -- here played by dancer and first-time actor Chi Cao -- can dance like an angel, but as a man with a psychologically and emotionally motivated life he remains almost completely elusive.

Thematically the inadvertent void at the film's center could have amounted to more: Early in his childhood, Li became a ward of the state, taken from his provincial Chinese village to be shaped and bullied and humiliated into a dancer under canonical despot and world class wackadoo Mao Tse-Tung's arts-building regime. Li is what his teachers, coaches, and communist overlords determine him to be, and aside from one scene we see of the young Li (Huang Wen Bin) crying in his dorm room at night, resistance to that determination is assumed to be futile.

He is chosen again when British choreographer Ben Stevenson (Bruce Greenwood, who gently minces through a deceptively complex part) makes a trip to the newly (if only slightly) opened China after Mao's death. "They're more like athletes than dancers," he says of the Chinese corps in Beijing, who have been trained to incorporate martial displays of dominance and strength into their house style. All except Li, he adds, in whom he sees the supple sensibility of an artist.

The two biggest developments in Li's life hinged on how others saw him, and what they thought he could do under two differing but essentially totalitarian forms of rule. But rather than moving from that perspective to a position of autonomy, or self-emergence, Beresford keeps Li on a definitive third-person plateau. As a result he's a character whose dramatic interest actually decreases as the film closes in on its ostensible climax -- his defection to the United States after a summer fellowship in Houston -- and peters out completely in its prolonged aftermath.

Given that the film was adapted (by Jan Sardi) from Li's autobiography, the dissociation of the subject from the events in his life is especially odd. The film opens with Li's arrival in Houston and plenty of gobsmacked reaction shots to its bounty; even his horror at the size of Ben's house and his line about white people all looking the same feel like a twice-removed interpretation of culture shock. And although the frequent flashbacks to his childhood in China (his mother is played by Joan Chen) that follow are motivated by Li's remembrance, there is nothing like a personal perspective contained in them.

There is also not much menace; if anything, Li's incredulous reaction to the Texan lifestyle seems apropos. He expects every facet of the world to have a conscribed meaning, and holds himself accountable to his communist ideals. Troubled by Ben's gift of an entirely new wardrobe, he asks why he would possibly need so many clothes; perplexed by a gag T-shirt emblazoned with an elephant being trounced by turkeys ("Don't let the turkeys get you down," the caption reads) he demands its significance. Chided for his weakness by his Chinese instructors, he had strength drilled into him; the American approach of sloganizing something like a bad day or a personal failing feels not like an improvement but the other extreme. And yet after this initial confrontation (which follows a warning from the Chinese consul-general against corruption at the hands of American class enemies), the questions of assimilation and which approach better serves not just a dancer but a developing human being -- like every other inherent point of interest in the film -- are elided completely.

And so when Li's Chinese teacher tells us that no other student rivals him in mental or moral strength, we have to take his word for it. Similarly, when Li takes up with a pretty American dancer (Amanda Schull) and she confesses, during their first clinch, that she's a virgin, it throws our lack of knowledge about Li's sexual history (i.e. it would appear he also has none, although he remains mum) into relief. Months later, when Li is asked if he married her because he loved her or because he wanted to stay in the country, I had absolutely no idea what he would say. For that matter it's never clear if he even likes ballet (the recent documentary Dancing Across Borders offers a more compelling look at a Cambodian dancer highly ambivalent about his gifts, and where they take him), or is merely dancing to please a rotating cast of masters.

When he finally challenges the Chinese authorities ("The party knows what's best for you," he is told; "I know what's best for me," he replies) the moment lacks both heat and conviction. The most convincing sequences are those designed simply to regard the dancers at work; an effortless rhythm develops, despite Beresford's rather uninspired direction, across the scenes of dancers meeting, putting their steps together, and creating art on stage. The degree to which they are willing to share their bodies with the world, seeming to reach out for it with each impossible extension, drawing it in with every reeling arabesque, suggests a desire for engagement that is visceral, human, and true in all the ways this film is not.