Thirty Great Movies You've Probably Never Seen: Kinky Boots

Year:  2005

Director:  Julian Jarrold

His name can be extremely intimidating:  Chiwetel Ejiofor.  And even if you don’t recognize the name, I promise you, if you’ve been to the movies in the last few years, you’ve seen him.  He played Keira Knightly’s husband in Love Actually.  He was the bad guy in Joss Wedon’s science fiction romp Serenity.  He was Denzell Washington’s sidekick in Inside Man and his brother in American Gangster.  A Brit of Nigerian heritage, he has become one of our most intense and versatile film actors. 

And he has one of his most colorful roles in this lovely, overlooked story about the ingenuity of the working class.

The movie stars Joel Edgerton (the star of another entry into this “Thirty Great Movies” series, The Geographic Explorations of Jasper Morello) as a young man who’s grown up in the shadow of his father’s small shoe factory.  Joel takes it for granted that he will never join his father in the business.  But, since this is a movie, fate reaches in and suddenly the factory is his responsibility.  He sighs and manfully signs up to run the place.

He’s faced with an immediate shock.  The business is failing!  It’s no longer successfully competing in the global fine men’s shoe market.  What to do?

Again, since this is a movie, he has a chance meeting with a professional drag queen named Lola (the divine Mr. Ejiofor).  The strike up an unlikely friendship, and it turns out Lola has a problem:  It’s just impossible for a drag queen to find decent shoes to perform in! 

Okay, okay, you can see what’s coming from a mile away, but I promise you, it doesn’t matter.  Of course the two men put their heads together and see if they can convert the staid old Price & Sons shoe factory from a supplier of traditional men’s footwear to a cutting edge creator of, well, fabulous shoes for a certain type of man.

The joy of this movie is in watching the transitions.  Can Joel find happiness making shoes?  Can Lola become a shoe designer?  Can Joel convince his workers to make shoes for drag queens?  Will Lola be able to work with Joel’s factory staff without completely freaking them out? 

And, mostly, will Price & Sons be able to complete all of the new shoes for the big show in Milan?! 

Since Ejiofor is such an amazing actor, his Lola is not simply a gimmicky “man in a dress.”  Lola is funny, touching, vulnerable, and strong.

I guess you could say this movie is in the tradition of such charming British working-class comedies as Brassed Off! and The Full Monty.  Sadly, however, Kinky Boots didn’t find nearly the audience that The Full Monty did.

The film’s director, Julian Jarrold, went on to some bigger success with Becoming Jane in 2007 (starring Anne Hathaway as novelist Jane Austen) and his remake of Brideshead Revisited in 2008.  But I think this quirky little film about wildly different people coming together as unlikely allies is his best.  I say put on your dancin’ shoes and enjoy Kinky Boots. 

[Thirty day Hub Challenge #12]