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THE COMPANY
(Robert Altman, U.S., 2003)
Reviewed by Julien Lapointe
a Film Comment online exclusive
Robert Altman's films have an engineered simplicity, seemingly random in design but compulsive in the details. His latest, The Company, spends a few months with the real-life Chicago Joffrey Ballet, while also sticking in professional actors like Neve Campbell, who plays the young dancer Ry. Only Campbell isn't the star, and her character arc is but one piece of the movie. There's no streamlined narrative here, just Altman mingling fictitious anecdotes with documentary realism - rehearsals, performances, in-between glimpses of off-stage romances.
Altman is eschewing his usual genre debunking and, with the exception of the visually stunning dance numbers, doesn't aim for dramatic highs. One advanced review in The Hollywood Reporter decried this as a minor work, but it's really a masterful compendium of minor incidents. These dancers are in their own time zone and the film skips from summer to winter in the blink of a ballet hop. Altman shares with us their joys: The Company is about the tangible uplift of living for your art.
Altman has moved from outwardly political (Nashville, Tanner '88) to intimately sociological (Short Cuts, Cookie's Fortune) studies of micro-milieux. He hasn't reneged on his past commitments as much as rethought where the counterculture fits in. Company head Alberto Antonelli (Malcolm McDowell) is staging a ballet about the Sixties, conveying the period's ribald zeal with deliberately measured thrusts and embraces. Later, the dancers parody his direction at a New Year's bash, only with sexed-up choreography, pelvic thrusts, and humping: pornography that's just barely within the province of ballet. Even if Antonelli is softening the edges of a libertine decade for the sake of an elite audience, he's also keeping the period alive for posterity - a laudable achievement.
Altman slips in fruitful ideas about the relationship between art, audiences and experience. In the film's most impressive scene, a storm breaks out during a dance performed by Roy and Domingo Rubio. Despite the downpour they keep at it, and the sheen of rain against the stage-light glare enhances their rhythm. This isn't just to dazzle the viewer; Altman is suggesting that in part artists work on instinct, through chance and circumstance. Afterwards when Antonelli praises Ry his speech is all verbiage. He may sound like a flake, but his words gush with energy and pleasure. The bluster is about feeling awkward towards something ineffable, which is both a savvy take on aesthetic experience and a fitting touch to a sequence scored with "My Funny Valentine."
For the most part the film gets by without words. Antonelli alludes to the many deceased dancers of recent years, without so much as a whispering the word AIDS - with Altman reducing every emotion to an ellipsis, there's no room for sentimentality. What's more, Altman and his dancers achieve something unique; free of lengthy speeches or exposition of any kind, they define their characters physically, with a simple look or posture. Altman doesn't just show the bruised feet and pulled muscles, but gives the viewers a heightened sense of their bodies. When Ry and sous chef Josh (James Franco) fall in love, their chemistry is writ large on their physiques. Her gait is lean, decisive, while he sports sensuous lips and a silken complexion: Franco is more feminine, while Campbell is more butch. Altman plays up the gender reversal, and in a twist on relationship clichés, has Josh cook and then wait for Ry to come home, as dinner gets cold.
The performances here are astonishingly genuine. In contrast to Hollywood's Oscar-bait vehicles, Altman never allows anyone to overwhelm our attention. Campbell doesn't play for the camera; she slips anonymously into the pack. There's such a divestment of any sense of acting, it's only distinctive in hindsight: she's memorable for being unmemorable. The Company is a remarkable shift for Altman as well. He's spliced this together so gracefully that he downplays any hint of directorial style. The film springs with the unhurried dexterity of dance.
- JULIEN LAPOINTE
