‘Save The Last Dance’ at 25: Julia Stiles Saved the Last Dance for Her Greatest Teen-Movie Triumph

In retrospect, the turn-of-the-century teen-movie boom was vanishingly short. One year, Can’t Hardly Wait was doing modest business; the next, She’s All That, Cruel Intentions, 10 Things I Hate About You, and American Pie were partying like it was 1999 (because it was); and as Y2K actually arrived, it was as if everyone had graduated and went off to separate colleges. There were still teen-driven hits – Bring It On became a deserved favorite in 2000, and the biggest-ever American Pie was the summer-after-college second installment, which arrived in 2001 – but that generation of teen-boom stars began to move on, largely unsuccessfully. So maybe it’s appropriate that when Julia Stiles appeared in one last youth-culture hit, it was called Save the Last Dance.

The seminal (or at least, sometimes rewatched) dance-movie romance opened a quarter-century ago to big early-January business; it actually outgrossed all of the aforementioned teen movies save the American Pie pictures. (As Sarah Michelle Gellar reminded us some years later, teen horniness is not a crime.) Maybe part of its appeal was the way it seemed to look beyond high school, despite being largely set in one. It follows Sara (Julia Stiles), a teenage girl who has given up on her ballet dreams out of guilt over her mother’s death. (She died in a car crash on her way to her daughter’s audition; Sara clearly fails to understand how parental guilt trip works if she takes that as a sign to give up dancing, rather than spending every waking minute on it in tribute to her mother’s memory.)

Sara starts over at a majority-Black school on Chicago’s South Side, but she ultimately can’t resist the siren call of dance – specifically, the blending of hip-hop and ballet. She’s encouraged to take another shot at Julliard by her new friend single-mom friend Chenille (a young Kerry Washington!) and, moreover, Chenille’s brother, the responsible and crushworthy Derek (Sean Patrick Thomas).

Derek’s upright nature is, in a weird way, one of the most discomfiting elements of the movie 25 years later, because the screenplay goes out of its way to emphasize that he’s one of the few Black boys at this school who is essentially good, rather than feckless, reckless, or a potential criminal. As much as the movie has Sara’s white friend from her old school showing racist attitudes, talking about dangerous neighborhoods and drive-bys, Derek does, amazingly, have a subplot that hinges on a possible drive-by. Acknowledging bad behavior at a South Side high school is one thing, and Save the Last Dance director Thomas Carter is indeed a Black man, so the movie isn’t seen purely through white eyes. But it does assume a white girl’s perspective on this situation with queasy ease; it does feature a Black woman expressing contrition for her skepticism of a thorny interracial relationship.

That perspective was probably also, admittedly, a big part of the movie’s success, ably capturing the imagination of the suburban-white-girl-cautiously-interested-in-Black-culture demographic. In other words, this is an unequivocal Julia Stiles vehicle, with her ideally cast as the serious-minded nerd reawakened by young love. She’s ideally cast in theory, anyway. Some of the movie’s dancing is shot and cut in such a way that it’s easy to imagine that Stiles may not be doing all of the fanciest footwork herself, even though at least some of it clearly is her. She and Thomas are charming in their flirtatious early scenes together, circling each other as he shows her the ropes of urban dance. Stiles has a slightly theatrical quality that makes her a fun rom-com foil; it’s as if she’s trying her best to roll her eyes as a precocious overachiever, but gets undone by her own stubborn sincerity.

Ultimately, though, the movie skews more toward soapy social melodrama than dance musical, and the scenes in between the dance moments sag. So maybe it was by accidental counterexample that Save the Last Dance did wind up kicking off an era of youth-oriented dance musicals, much more so than another round of high-school romances. Most prominently, five years later a movie ripped off this movie and reversed it, with a hip-hop dancer trying his hand at ballet, and the Step Up series was born. The superior Step Up sequels also took their cues from Save the Last Dance, realizing that street-level dancing infused with other styles is more fun than ballet with a small dose of hip-hop.

In the meantime, Stiles had hit it bigger than much of her teen-movie cohort; bigger than, say, Freddie Prinze Jr., Matthew Lillard, or Sarah Michelle Gellar, who were all regressing into a Scooby-Doo movie the same summer that Stiles jumped into more grown-up fare with The Bourne Identity. Despite her ongoing supporting role in that franchise, though, she never quite transcended her teen-movie origins, which makes Save the Last Dance, about a young woman preparing for the next phase of her life, a little more poignant in retrospect. (More so, anyway, than her previous crack at graduating to college-level courses, the risible Down to You with Prinze.) Corny as the movie is, it is iconic to a certain generation, as Chloe Fineman illustrated (with Stiles’ good-natured participation) on Saturday Night Live a few years ago. It may have been the last gasp of a particular teen-movie era, but Stiles got to take a hell of a cute senior-year photo.

Jesse Hassenger (@rockmarooned) is a writer living in Brooklyn. He’s a regular contributor to The A.V. Club, Polygon, and The Week, among others. He podcasts at www.sportsalcohol.com, too.