Most Western-made biopics framed by flight from totalitarian countries to the United States — of which the enjoyably sentimental Mao’s Last Dancer is one — come across as hymns to American freedom emphatically underlined by brutal dictatorship in the mother state.
That’s an accurate, if reductive, view of the defection of Chinese dancer Li Cunxin to the Houston Ballet in 1981; Li lived to tell the tale in an autobiography that sold very well in Australia, where he now lives. And any way you cut it, life was no picnic under Mao, particularly in far-flung villages like the one Li lived in during the 1970s, where great leaps of any kind were discouraged unless mandated by the state.
Mao’s Last Dancer describes the inevitable-for-its-genre journey from communist rags to capitalist riches. Plucked from his humble village with the beaming support of his parents, Li, who’s played by three actors as he grows up, endures the rigors of training under party hacks and a kindly old teacher who loves the Bolshoi.
Rising through the ranks, Li gets to perform politically correct ballets for Madame Mao, the self-appointed culture vulture to the Glorious Revolution who has a thing for dances with rifles. (She’s played by Xiuqing Yue, a dead ringer for the Iron First Chairlady.)
Plucked yet again by American choreographer Ben Stevenson — the excellent Bruce Greenwood, deftly communicating Ben’s kindness, his graceful, ex-dancerish gayness and his astute political sense — Li arrives in Houston armed with his childhood blankie, a shiny suit and a videotape of Baryshnikov slipped to him by the Chinese dance teacher before he was carted off for thought reform.