OVERVIEW
DeeDee (Shirley MacLaine) and Emma (Anne Bancroft) came up together as dancers in the same New York ballet company and used to compete for the lead roles. That is, until DeeDee got pregnant, married, and moved to Oklahoma City to raise a family and run a dance studio. Emma stayed and went on to become the company’s prima ballerina. Years later, both are facing the consequences of their choices: DeeDee is bored with her ordinary life and has spent years harboring resentment toward Emma, who has aged out of the roles but is not ready to give up dancing. Old wounds reopen when the company passes through Oklahoma on tour and invites DeeDee’s teenage daughter, Emilia (Leslie Browne), to join them in New York.
BACKGROUND
The Turning Point belongs to the pile of countless Oscar-hungry projects on which the strategy worked only in the short term. It joined the equally safe Julia as the respectable adult choice of the year, in a Best Picture race that had Star Wars at the other end of the spectrum. The film received 11 nominations, many of them undeserved, and became the Oscars’ biggest loser (later tied with Spielberg’s The Color Purple) after going home empty-handed.
Arthur Laurents’ script is based on the true story of two ballerinas, Isabel Mirrow Brown and Nora Kaye, the latter of whom married Herbert Ross, a former choreographer turned commercially reliable studio director (Funny Lady, The Sunshine Boys). The connections don’t stop there: Leslie Browne, who plays Emilia, is Brown’s daughter, and Kaye is her real-life godmother.
Today, the film is hard to find on streaming, out of print on Blu-ray, and remembered only by the most ardent Oscar or ballet aficionados.
THE REVIEW
The behind-the-scenes world of a ballet company had already delivered a fantastic film in The Red Shoes and would go on to inspire Black Swan, two pinnacles full of beauty and intensity. Both characteristics are nowhere to be found in The Turning Point, which trades them for schmaltzy conflicts worthy of soap operas, except far less enjoyable than those.
There are times, especially in the storyline centered on Bancroft, when a level of authenticity captivates, but it is never grounded in characters we care about, and the strange structure is to blame. Given how closely the material mirrors the real-life story, it is evident that care was taken to revive pivotal moments in these dancers’ lives, yet the film skips the buildup to get there. Within the first few minutes, DeeDee already voices her resentment toward Emma, we get no flashbacks, and the conflict then sits frozen until a big third-act showdown where DeeDee mostly repeats the same grievances. Emilia fares no better, since we meet her too early in the process, at a point where her choices cannot yet cost her what her mother’s once did. With that, The Turning Point becomes a film with no stakes, in which its biggest conflicts have already happened or have yet to happen.
The two Hollywood stars still fit surprisingly well into a universe where real dancers were cast for authenticity, and both bring nuance to a formulaic script. Bancroft has the more interesting arc, an aged ballerina who reaches the end of her career without being ready for it. She has the aura of someone who has lived many years as a diva, which makes each signal that her time is up land increasingly harder, and she turns it heartbreaking with looks that don’t hide the pain of someone who had years to prepare for this moment and never managed to.
The script is less sympathetic to MacLaine’s DeeDee, whose frustrations read as whining and make her hard to root for. “Why do problems for people like you always seem more important than people like me?” she asks Emma. Great question, and one the movie doesn’t seem to argue against, as it leaves her most interesting material, the true nature of her marriage, to the side. At least both actresses make their scenes together count.
The film grows far less interesting whenever it focuses on Emilia. Leslie Browne is not at fault, as she does bring the naiveté the role requires and delivers fantastic dance sequences, even though that hardly justifies an Oscar nomination. What truly kills it is what the film throws as its conflicts: the lackluster romance with the company’s Russian star (Mikhail Baryshnikov, another puzzling Oscar nomination) and the reckless night of drinking that culminates in a truly awful scene.
Everything around the drama is competently mounted, although never transcendent. The long dance interludes, filmed like televised stage recordings, are huge pace-killers. The one scene that wakes the audience is a third-act physical fight between Emma and DeeDee, a funny scene that finally breaks the monotony.
FINAL THOUGHTS
For a film named after the decisive moment in a dancer’s life, The Turning Point never stages one of its own. Well-acted individual scenes occasionally pique interest, especially when the film stays with Bancroft’s Emma. What remains is a handsome, empty prestige piece whose eleven nominations say more about the Academy’s 1978 anxieties than about the film itself. Its spot belonged to a far more memorable ballet film released the same year. One with far more tears and blood.