Why "Dirty Dancing" is the best girl movie ever

You can keep "Havana Nights" -- nothing compares to the original, a sizzling film that offered awkward, smart teens hope that a sexy heartthrob might sweep them away.

By Curtis Sittenfeld

Feb. 27, 2004 | There are other reasons why "Dirty Dancing" is the best girl movie ever made, and other reasons why its fans are so passionate, but the defining one is this: "Dirty Dancing's" basic proposition is that it's entirely reasonable for a moderately attractive young woman to find love with a smolderingly hot man. Go ahead and make jokes about Patrick Swayze in, well, pretty much any other role he's ever played. But as Johnny Castle, goy dance instructor at a Jewish resort in 1963, he's a swoon-inducing heartthrob.

This is why seeing Swayze in "Dirty Dancing: Havana Nights," the "Dirty Dancing" remake out today nationwide, is so depressing. Swayze's face looks both bloated and stringy, and because he wears similar clothes and plays a similar, if much less significant, role -- this time, he's the dance instructor at a swanky Havana hotel in 1958 -- it's as if ever since he mouthed "And I owe it all to you" in the last scene of the original, he's been preserved in formaldehyde. If Swayze embraced his age, it would be fine, possibly even sexy. But in the new movie, he's meant to be a kind of ageless, sexless dance Buddha who dispenses hollow psychobabble about "moving though your fear" to the main character Katey Miller (Romola Garai). He's so aggressively terrible that it's as if every minute he appears onscreen reduces his hotness in the original "Dirty Dancing" by 1%; luckily, he appears for only about ten minutes.

The bad news is that as awful as he is, Patrick Swayze is far from the worst thing about "Havana Nights." Set five years before the original, with an otherwise completely different cast, it contains lines and shots that echo "Dirty Dancing" -- but not successfully. The plot, which unfolds against the backdrop of Fidel Castro's rise to power, could feel far more urgent than the abortion story driving the original movie. But instead, the swirl of class, race and dancing -- Cuban Javier gets fired from his waiter job at the hotel after he's spotted with American Katey, Katey then convinces him to enter a contest to win money -- lacks real momentum. The good news? All the shortcomings of "Havana Nights" remind you what a truly excellent movie the first "Dirty Dancing" is.

If you haven't indulged lately, a recap: In the summer of 1963, 17-year-old Baby Houseman (Jennifer Grey) goes with her parents and sister to a resort in the Catskills. While her parents play golf and her sister frets about lipstick, Baby secretly immerses herself in the staff subculture. When a dance instructor needs an abortion, Baby volunteers to fill in for the woman at a performance at another resort. As circumstances with the illegal abortion and Baby's family become more complicated, Baby and her dance partner Johnny Castle have no choice but to hold many sweaty rehearsals featuring much physical contact in increasingly skimpy clothing. Pegged as "a nicely bittersweet genre movie" by the New York Times, Dirty Dancing cost $6 million to make and grossed over $150 million worldwide.

I was 12 when my best friend Annie and I saw "Dirty Dancing" at Mariemont Theater in Cincinnati, Ohio, in 1987 and afterwards I wrote a rapturous, multi-page plot synopsis in a powder blue journal with a cat on the cover and a thin blue ribbon for place-marking. I loved "Dirty Dancing" because of the dancing, which is just so much fun to watch. I loved it because it tackles big subjects, like first love, parental tension, and class conflict, without neglecting the smaller subjects: Minor characters are well-developed (smarmy resort heir Neil, Baby's annoying sister Lisa), and there are so many terrific details and moments (the part where Johnny tries to soulfully run his hand down Baby's raised arm and the side of her torso, and she keeps laughing because it tickles). But most of all, of course, I loved "Dirty Dancing" because of Baby herself.

I couldn't have articulated this as a teenager, but the movie strikes a perfect balance between not taking itself too seriously while never being dismissive or mocking of Baby. She's smart and curious and good-hearted -- she's at her most confident when she's doing the right thing, whether it's warning jerk waiter Robbie to stay away from her sister or comforting dance instructor Penny about her impending abortion -- and she's also fidgety and hesitant and dorky. And, as she figures things out, she's looking forward -- toward adulthood. In "Havana Nights" teenagers exist in the false high school world of overly bitchy girls and parents who don't understand. Baby isn't much older than these characters ("Dirty Dancing" takes place the summer before she enters Mount Holyoke) but she's way more interesting because of her own interest in the adult world.

Unlike many movie heroines whose goofiness is always, at base, supposed to be cute, Baby's awkwardness is authentic to an uncomfortable degree -- and she herself knows it. The first night at the resort, as Baby stands in the staff quarters in her prim sundress watching the employees getting freaky to Otis Redding's "Love Man," Johnny approaches to ask why she's there. She convinced Johnny's cousin to let her accompany him by helping lug food, so she says, "I carried a watermelon" -- and immediately realizes what a weird, dumb comment it was. Even more cringingly, after Johnny first dances with Baby in the same scene, there's a moment when she's finally cut loose, the song ends, she cheers gleefully, and then she realizes that Johnny has wandered off, indifferent to her.

That Baby is, in her gawkiness, so easy to identify with and that she eventually triumphs is, for many of us, a cinematic combo that's hard to beat. "That first dance demonstration when Baby dances with the old woman, and she's moving left where everyone else is moving right, is totally me," says Ellen Battistelli, 53, a director of membership and programs at a reproductive health association who lives in Silver Spring, Md. "And then all of a sudden she gets good, she gets great, she gets so drop-dead fabulous." Or, as a 29-year-old lawyer in Washington who didn't want her name used because she's not out of the "Dirty Dancing" closet said, Baby "has a big nose, like me, and [Johnny] still falls in love with her."

Johnny, meanwhile, is macho but not threatening but not unthreatening either. His ability to seem tough and rugged while wearing dance pants and tank tops for most of the movie is nothing short of miraculous. And the significance of the male lead who's more attractive than the female can't be underestimated -- it's so rare as to be, à la "Something's Gotta Give" with its older-man-who-dares-to-date-older-woman premise, subversive. (This is why Jennifer Grey's post-"Dirty Dancing" nose job felt like a personal betrayal; for those of us with a weak understanding of the difference between fact and fiction, it implied maybe Johnny didn't love Baby unconditionally after all.)

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