I am a child of the 80s, and I like to think that I’m pretty up on the
pop culture of that decade, particularly when it comes to movies.
However, perhaps in part because of my two left feet, I never latched
onto either Dirty Dancing or Footloose. I heard some of
the music, of course, and I saw clips on television specials, but that’s
always been one little chunk of quintessential 80s that I’ve been
missing. While I still need to remedy that one of these days, I did see
the remake of Footloose recently. Maybe my reaction to it would have been different if I’d grown up with the original, but I quite enjoyed it.
The movie revolves around Ren McCormack (Kenny Wormald), a
free-thinking Bostonian who has just moved to a tiny Southern town in
the wake of his mother’s death. He finds welcome with his supportive
uncle Wes (Ray McKinnon), warm-hearted aunt Lulu (Kim Dickens) and
adoring little cousins Amy (Maggie Elizabeth Jones)
and Sarah (Mary-Charles Jones). The rest of the town is a bit slower to
accept him, however. He’s the new kid on the block, so it’s easy to
accuse him of stirring up trouble, though aside from a little fast
driving and loud music, he’s a pretty upstanding young man.
Still, he feels stifled by all the rules in a community that has turned
to legalism for comfort in the wake of a terrible tragedy. After the
deaths of several teens, including the son of local pastor Shaw Moore (Dennis Quaid),
in a car accident on the way home from a dance, the town council
enacted a ban on public dancing, and Ren becomes determined to overturn
it. His attraction to the reverend’s daughter Ariel (Julianne Hough),
who is the greater rabble-rouser by far, does nothing to endear him to
this clergyman who still hasn’t fully processed the loss that his family
suffered.
From the moment that Ren turns up in town and gets
rushed by his exuberant cousins, he pretty much won me over. He’s got a
bit of a rebellious streak, but he’s a really likable guy. Ariel takes a
little longer to warm to, since she seems to have chosen a very
self-destructive path and spends the early part of the movie pushing
away everyone who really cares about her. Ultimately, however, she
becomes easy to sympathize with as well.
On the other hand,
while Rev. Moore is set up as the primary antagonist, this certainly is
not a cookie-cutter situation in which the restrictive establishment is
Evil. Indeed, he is a complex man whose deep faith and love for his
family and parishioners informs everything he does, making his actions
understandable even when they are frustrating. Quaid’s nuanced
performance actually makes Shaw my favorite character in the movie save
Willard (Miles Teller), the somewhat dopey local teen who quickly
becomes Ren’s best friend. A regular source of comic relief throughout
the movie, he particularly tickled my funny bone in the scene in which
the two meet.
I’m sure that it was a bit superfluous to remake
this movie less than three decades after it first hit theaters, but
writer-director Craig Brewer brought a deep affection for the original
to the project, and I would imagine that many contemporary teens who saw
the remake might want to check out the 1983 version as well. Not having
seen it, I can’t draw comparisons, but as a stand-alone movie, the new
edition of Footloose entertains and invites thoughtful discussion about the balance between safety and freedom.
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