Starring Richard Gere, Susan Sarandon and Jennifer Lopez, Shall We Dance is a wonderful story about not just accepting life if it does not make you happy, but it gives permission to innocently want more ... and to find it.

Shall We Dance is about John Clark, (played by Richard Gere) who is an attorney that deals in wills, becomes complacent in his life and finds happiness on the ballroom dance floor. He loves his wife Beverly (played by Susan Sarandon) and his daughter; however, he begins to feel that there is something missing from his life. On the train coming home every evening, he begins to notice a beautiful girl, Paulina, (played by Jennifer Lopez) in the window of a dance studio that looks troubled and forlorn. He becomes intrigued, not because she is a beautiful woman, but because she “looks the way he feels.” So, he musters enough courage to enter Mitzi’s Dance Studio and to sign up for dancing lessons, while keeping it a secret from his wife and daughter. Paulina is one of his instructors and Clark develops friendships not only with her, but with the other characters as well.

Beverly begins to have suspicions as to her husband’s whereabouts, so she hires a detective to follow him. Once she finds out that he is innocently taking ballroom dance lessons, she wonders why, but allows her husband his privacy, until the big competition. The detective invites his wife and daughter to the competition, where his secret is exposed.

After the competition, Paulina is going back to England to begin dancing again, and invites Clark to a party to dance with him one more time and to say thank you. She writes him a letter, which he lets his wife read. The morning of the party, he finds on the kitchen table his tux and a pair of shiny black shoes with a note from his wife, “Go to the party. I will be working late.”

However, he dresses in the tux and shiny shoes, dons a red rose ... but appears at the department store where his wife works. He presents her with the rose and tells her that he has only one partner. Then he asks her to dance. “Right here?” his wife asks. “But I don’t know the steps.”

“I’ll teach you,” he replies.

In the next scene, they arrive at the party just in time to dance the spotlight dance with the partner of Paulina’s choice. Clark arrives just in time, kisses his wife and she tells him to go dance with her.

Shall We Dance is both innocent and funny, answering the question of what to do when life becomes mundane, without leaving your family. The dance scenes were fabulous and beautiful, but funny at times, with characters that warm the viewer’s heart. Gere, Sarandon and Lopez give wonderful, moving performances as well. It is a quiet sleeper of a movie that will pleasantly surprise the viewer, who can not help but to be taken into this different world. I highly recommend Shall We Dance, a must see movie. I give it five stars.