Back in 2011, The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel appealed to more than its older stars’ demographic. N
ow, in the same vein, comes Finding Your Feet. Directed by Richard Loncraine and written by Meg Leonard and Nick Moorcroft, it follows Sandra (Imelda Staunton), an uptight upper crust Brit who’s left unmoored after she discovers her husband and her best friend have been having a longtime affair. She decides to move in with her free-spirited sister Bif (Celia Imrie) with whom she hasn’t spoken in years.
Fed up with Sandra’s sullen nastiness, Bif drags her along to her community dance class where they meet Charlie (Timothy Spall), a kindly man who sold everything a few years ago to pay for his ailing wife’s treatment after she was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s. Despite some initial tension, Charlie and Sandra start to connect and Sandra must decide if her new life might be the one she was always meant to live. It’s a standard rom-com setup, but what makes it work is the way the actors pull of the film’s charming mix of humor and emotion.
Though Finding Your Feet isn’t strictly a musical, it does use some of the genre’s tropes. One of the best comes when Charlie and Sandra share their first dance. Though they’ve done nothing but bicker up to that point, they don’t speak a word once they start to dance and Staunton and Spall let their chemistry convince the audience of their connection. Sure, there’s something cliché in Sandra having to cede control to start to like Charlie, but it’s effective and recalls similar scenes in classical musicals (see Cyd Charisse and Fred Astaire in The Band Wagon for possibly the best example).
Though that scene is mostly about the characters’ emotional connection, the film also uses the dancing for comedic effect. Perhaps the best example comes near the end when the dance troupe travels to Rome for a special performance. The number begins with Sandra and Bif performing Irving Berlin’s “Sisters” (perhaps best known from White Christmas). Rather than dance the opening bars, they perform a synchronized routine in electric wheelchairs. The moment is shocking and darkly humorous in a way that perfectly makes a joke about their age while still letting the actresses be in on the joke.
That said, there are times when the film’s jokes about the characters’ ages feels mean-spirited or counterproductive. Take the scene where Bif brings a gentleman home after a date. The scene starts well, with Bif confidently performing a striptease for him. It’s thrilling to see an older woman so sexually adventurous onscreen when they’re so often portrayed as mother types long past that point. Unfortunately, Leonard and Moorcraft balk at the last second by giving Bif’s friend a fatal heart attack. It’s an obvious joke, but one that feels cowardly when the alternative would be so much more empowering.
However, as frequently as the film makes fun of its characters’ age, it also respects the experience they’ve gained through that age. Part of what makes Sandra’s struggle to find happiness and fulfillment later in life so compelling is that she does so by returning to things that made her happy when she was young. As we slowly learn in small moments throughout the film, Sandra used to be a very skilled dancer, performing in ballroom competitions as a young girl and even having burgeoning career on the West End before she became pregnant. So, Sandra’s story isn’t just about reawakening, but the reclamation of abandoned dreams.
Nowhere is that idea more poignantly conveyed, though, than through Bif. Late in the film, when the sisters and the dance troupe are in Rome, Bif suddenly reveals that not only has she been there before, but that she was engaged to a man there in her youth who died shortly before the wedding. There is something both beautiful and heartbreaking in the idea that even a person who’s lived as freely and openly as Bif could still end up living a different life than the one she’d hoped. If only that were the only hardship we had to see Bif face.
In the end, what really keeps Finding Your Feet from succeeding is its own lack of restraint. Some of those issues are small, like the panic attack Sandra has early on that never recurs. It’s meant to emphasize how uptight and lost she is in the wake of her husband’s betrayal, but we already understand that from the casual racism she displays while she and Bif dine in a Chinese restaurant or her nasty attitude. It’s an unnecessary pile-on, but hardly egregious.
Much harder to forgive is a storyline involving Bif in the film’s latter half. No spoilers here, but let’s just say that Bif’s big, vibrant personality isn’t the only reason she resembles Whoopi Goldberg’s character in How Stella Got Her Groove Back. While the plot device affects Sandra’s emotional state in a big way, Charlie’s revelation about his wife does the same work and what happens to Bif ends up feeling like crass emotional manipulation on the film’s part. And it’s, unfortunately, not the only plot point in the film’s ending that goes for cliché and cheap emotion rather than something deeper.
Charming as Finding Your Feet is, it’s also its own worst enemy. Were it just a story about a woman of a certain age getting her groove back, it would be a great romantic comedy. As is, it has one tragic twist too many and its This is Us-style commitment to emotional manipulation brings it from poignant to cloying. Older audiences will still find a lot to enjoy, but they and the film’s characters deserved a story that had a little more respect for its elders.
Rating: 7.5/10
