Take the Lead: Inspiration from a True Story
by Rachel Cox
“This isn’t Shakespeare, Mr. Dulaine. This is public education.” With this quote, Antonio Banderas begins his journey into the realms of high school detention as Pierre Dulaine, the founder of Dancing Classrooms. This movie moves from the typical Hollywood chick flick entertainment to an inspiring story about becoming who you are. Think about it: When was the last time you felt inspired by a movie? I don’t mean thinking about how amazing the soundtrack, the explosions, or the lead character was. The last movie that you watched, did it make you feel as if you could conquer the world?
Inspiration cannot come from every movie, but it can come from a select few, those based off true stories, at least the ones that hold true to their founders. Using Take the Lead, I will explain what these movies have to offer us, and why they are inspirational.
First, movies based off of true stories use characters, language, and setting to show where we are, and that we can overcome it. Take the Lead depicts the lives of several students at an inner city New York City high school. These students swear, they get into trouble, and they try to get an education so they do not end up like their parents. Most people have never had to deal drugs just to put food on the table, never had to run away in the middle of the night to somewhere safe, never had to call a teacher from jail because that person might be the only one to pick you up. Not all of us have gone through this, but we have all found ourselves in bad situations, in a place different from home because home was no longer safe, or fleeing from the terrors of life. But we can overcome this. Pierre Dulaine offered students a way to leave what they came from behind, a way to learn confidence, grace, and respect.
This takes us to the other inspirational offering this movie gives us: themes of trust, respect, and control over ourselves and our destinies. Perhaps the best scene to demonstrate trust is where Dulaine forces the Rock and LaRhette to dance together, blindfolded. Dancing requires two people and a mutual trust that neither will let the other down. Carefully building trust takes the entire movie, but in the end, the students trust Mr. Dulaine, for he never let them down, and each other because they spent the time building each other up and growing. Along with trust comes respect; in fact, one cannot exist without the other. To truly trust someone, you must respect him or her, and to respect that person, there must exist some type of trust. As he helps them grow, Dulaine teaches the students respect through dancing, and by his respectful treatment of them. In time, they come to respect him, trusting him to guide them.
In learning trust and respect, the students learn how to take charge of their lives. They realize that they need to trust themselves to move onward, leaving their previous lives behind. They overcome the drugs, the language, the poverty, and find a wealth of potential inside themselves. Watching this, the typical audience roots for them, not only because they are the underdogs, but because that audience identifies with them. Watching those characters grow and develop encourages personal applications of the themes, allowing the audience to connect personally to the situations.
Movies do not have to be pure entertainment: They can inspire and uplift as well. The most inspirational movies are those based off of true stories because these offer situations and characters that are real and relatable, as well as themes that have personal applications. A wonderful example of this is Take the Lead, where the students grow, and the audience learns with them.
“This isn’t Shakespeare, Mr. Dulaine. This is public education.” With this quote, Antonio Banderas begins his journey into the realms of high school detention as Pierre Dulaine, the founder of Dancing Classrooms. This movie moves from the typical Hollywood chick flick entertainment to an inspiring story about becoming who you are. Think about it: When was the last time you felt inspired by a movie? I don’t mean thinking about how amazing the soundtrack, the explosions, or the lead character was. The last movie that you watched, did it make you feel as if you could conquer the world?
Inspiration cannot come from every movie, but it can come from a select few, those based off true stories, at least the ones that hold true to their founders. Using Take the Lead, I will explain what these movies have to offer us, and why they are inspirational.
First, movies based off of true stories use characters, language, and setting to show where we are, and that we can overcome it. Take the Lead depicts the lives of several students at an inner city New York City high school. These students swear, they get into trouble, and they try to get an education so they do not end up like their parents. Most people have never had to deal drugs just to put food on the table, never had to run away in the middle of the night to somewhere safe, never had to call a teacher from jail because that person might be the only one to pick you up. Not all of us have gone through this, but we have all found ourselves in bad situations, in a place different from home because home was no longer safe, or fleeing from the terrors of life. But we can overcome this. Pierre Dulaine offered students a way to leave what they came from behind, a way to learn confidence, grace, and respect.
This takes us to the other inspirational offering this movie gives us: themes of trust, respect, and control over ourselves and our destinies. Perhaps the best scene to demonstrate trust is where Dulaine forces the Rock and LaRhette to dance together, blindfolded. Dancing requires two people and a mutual trust that neither will let the other down. Carefully building trust takes the entire movie, but in the end, the students trust Mr. Dulaine, for he never let them down, and each other because they spent the time building each other up and growing. Along with trust comes respect; in fact, one cannot exist without the other. To truly trust someone, you must respect him or her, and to respect that person, there must exist some type of trust. As he helps them grow, Dulaine teaches the students respect through dancing, and by his respectful treatment of them. In time, they come to respect him, trusting him to guide them.
In learning trust and respect, the students learn how to take charge of their lives. They realize that they need to trust themselves to move onward, leaving their previous lives behind. They overcome the drugs, the language, the poverty, and find a wealth of potential inside themselves. Watching this, the typical audience roots for them, not only because they are the underdogs, but because that audience identifies with them. Watching those characters grow and develop encourages personal applications of the themes, allowing the audience to connect personally to the situations.
Movies do not have to be pure entertainment: They can inspire and uplift as well. The most inspirational movies are those based off of true stories because these offer situations and characters that are real and relatable, as well as themes that have personal applications. A wonderful example of this is Take the Lead, where the students grow, and the audience learns with them.
