Footloose (2011)

The 2011 renovation of Footloose arrives with its Southern grit intact and its cultural ambitions kept modest. Craig Brewer relocates the fictional town of Bomont from Utah to Georgia, where a reverend's grief has been codified into an ordinance against unsupervised dancing. A Boston teenager named Ren arrives, dances anyway, and the machinery of the 1984 original grinds forward with new country covers and better-lit motocross. The film is about grief and rebellion, and it is content to leave it there.

The picture's progressive sensibilities are slight. Ariel, the minister's daughter, pushes against her father's control and collects a black eye for her trouble, but her defiance reads as standard teenage rebellion, not a sustained argument about gender. A Latina best friend and a Black classmate occupy the margins, present without comment, in the room while the film declines to explain why that matters. The actual racial history of the rural South goes untouched. No environmental sermon, no critique of the cotton mill's labor arrangements, no meditation on bodies or brains. Any moralizing here concerns dancing and the proper way to mourn, and it arrives without a recognizable political program.

As remakes go, this one is a renovation, faithful to the blueprint and uninterested in arguing with it. The original film's author helped write the screenplay, which may explain the reverence on display. It opened in second place and won nothing, and it seems at peace with that outcome. The result is a pleasant, well-choreographed exercise in nostalgia that carries its social consciousness the way a prom attendee carries a corsage: lightly, and mostly for show.