The Company

The
Company

The Company is a weird
project for Robert Altman to undertake: a ballet drama conceived
entirely by actress Neve Campbell as a showcase for her own interest and
background in dance. Campbell wrote the script with screenwriter
Barbara Turner, and brought the film to Altman, who initially resisted
but finally agreed to direct. It is an obvious vanity project, a film
designed to showcase Campbell's involvement with dance; she'd been
trained in ballet and revisited her training to prepare for this role.
But instead of feeling like an indulgence, the film is moving and
beautiful in capturing Campbell's obvious love for this milieu, and
Altman's sympathetic, nuanced treatment fully supports the joy and
beauty these dancers find in their work. This is a lovely tribute to the
ballet, capturing the grandiose aesthetics and elaborate designs of
these performances, which Altman filmed in full to gather the material
for the film's dance sequences.

And make no mistake: this film
exists almost entirely for the sake of its dance sequences. It's
tempting to deem the film, which follows a ballet company through a
single season, one of Altman's typical sprawling multi-character
studies, capturing bits and pieces of various stories and characters
backstage between dances. In fact, the film's narrative is Altmanesque
only in superficial ways, in that it has many characters and that it
doesn't have a real central narrative. Whereas Altman's Nashville
and Short Cuts decentralized the narrative in order to follow
many characters, observing fragments of their stories and developing
them through vignettes rather than a plot with a real forward momentum, The
Company all but eliminates plot and drama. Campbell's heroine Ry
is the closest the film gets to a central character, but she doesn't
really have much of a story: she wants to move up to a more prominent
role in the company, she falls in love with a new guy after her dancer
boyfriend cheats on her, and, well, that's about it. There are other
miniature dramas here and there, too, some money worries, injuries,
other little suggestions of the characters' pasts or concerns. Mostly,
though, the plot is frictionless, designed not to distract too much from
the dance performances; there's no drama, no character development, no
real story at all. It's such a common criticism — and misunderstanding —
of Altman's films that they have no plot, no narrative structure, so
it's illuminating to see the difference here, to see what an Altman film
without a true narrative would really be like.

It's in that
sense that the film feels most like a vanity project: Ry is a character
without real problems, and she meets and falls in love with a hunky sous
chef named Josh (James Franco), and that's her story. It's pretty
fluffy stuff, but Altman infuses this milieu with heft and substance
through his serious, respectful treatment of this world and these
performances. The dances, of course, are stunning, and Altman makes good
use of the garish light and color in the design of the sets, costumes
and choreography here. Many of the dances are opportunities for Altman's
camera to roam through the complex patterns of colors and geometry that
these dancers form with their bodies: the rigid computer circuit
patterns formed with colored ribbons in the opening number, the riot of
color and rapid movement in the animal-suited dancers of the finale, the
three dancers evoking a multi-armed Hindu god by projecting their
merged shadows onto a red screen.


A few dance sequences in particular are tours
de force that really showcase Altman's intuitive feel for the grace and
aesthetics of these dances. Ry's first moment in the spotlight is a
dance at an outdoor venue where, just as she takes the stage for her pas
de deux with a male dancer, a thunderstorm begins to threaten,
with ominous rumbles of thunder and a harsh wind blowing debris and the
first drops of rain through the air. The atmosphere is tense and hushed
as Ry and her partner enact a sexy, sensual dance of seduction, the
flashes of lightning occasionally lighting up their faces, the wind
flowing over them, as the crowd mumbles and shifts nervously, a few
umbrellas going up in the audience. It's so tense because one suspects
that mainstay of backstage movies, the career-halting injury, could be
waiting in the wings — and there are a few of those, scattered here and
there in the film, reminders of the lineage from which this movie
descends. But in this case, the thunderstorm simply enhances the mood of
the dance, making it dangerous and haunting in ways it wouldn't have
been otherwise.

Altman also seems to enjoy offering up a tribute
to David Lynch, of all people, by including one dance sequence scored to
"The World Spins," one of the songs Lynch and his composer Angelo
Badalamenti wrote for avant-pop singer Julee Cruise. This sequence is
appropriately ethereal, matching Cruise's lilting voice and the ambient
melodicism of the music with cool blue hues and a ghostly dance enacted
entirely on a low trapeze swing. Altman abstracts the dancer's movements
by switching to an overhead shot in which the dancer's body is simply
one element in a complex design of blue lights arranged on the floor. At
other points, he films her blurry reflection in the glossy surface of
the stage, or films her feet as she swings slowly back and forth, her
outstretched toes just above the stage, swaying up and out of the frame,
leaving behind a moment of black nothingness before her feet reappear
as she swings back. It's poetic and mysterious, a perfect nod to Lynch.

Elsewhere,
Altman enlivens the basic plotlessness of the non-dance sequences with
some flashes of humor and vitality, particularly in the character of the
company's domineering artistic director Alberto Antonelli (Malcolm
McDowell). Antonelli gets some of the best non-dance scenes in the film,
delivering a speech to an Italian-American society in which, rather
than being grateful for the award he just received, he castigates his
own Italian family for mocking his dance ambitions when he was a kid.
Implicit in his words is a warning to be more tolerant, especially since
in another scene he laments all the great choreographers and dancers
who have been lost to AIDs; it's implied that he's gay, and that this is
very much a gay milieu. Probably Antonelli's funniest moment is an
argument with a dancer who's protesting the ridiculous conception of a
particular sequence for two male dancers. "This baby is a metaphor,"
Antonelli insists, spouting some elaborate patter about "giving birth to
the world." The dancer isn't buying it: "he's a man, how's he gonna
give birth?" It's hilarious, and one wishes there were more of this,
more of the humor and messiness that so often exists around the fringes
of an Altman film. Too much of this film is so tidy, so minimal. There
are suggestions of characterization here and there — an older woman who
wishes she could still dance, an aging member of the company fighting
against getting pushed out herself, a young man with an aggressive
manager — but none of it ever really amounts to anything.

Still,
even if The Company isn't prime Altman, it's a well-made and
frequently moving film in which the abstract emotional catharsis of the
dance is placed at the center of the film, rather than all the backstage
romances and troubles, which seem incidental in comparison. It's a film
that takes joy in movement, both in the rehearsals, where a movement's
development is traced and coached along, and in the polished shows
themselves. This fascination with movement even extends outside of the
dancing milieu, in shots like Ry getting out of the bath behind a
screen, her silhouetted body later echoed by the multi-armed shadow of
the male dancers, or Josh's legs waving in the air as he puts his pants
on, or the elegance of the way he chops up peppers and tomatoes to make
an omelet, or the crisp, mathematical motions of Ry as she shoots pool.
These scenes suggest that beautiful human motion is everywhere, in
everyday life and work as well as on a stage: chopping up peppers or
shooting pool can be as beautiful as a pirouette. Even bowling can be
beautiful: at one point Altman cleverly cuts from Ry and the other
dancers practicing a move to a bowling lane where a dancer repeats
virtually the same arm motion as she releases the ball, doing a twirl
afterward. These small moments, rather than the prosaic, formulaic
narrative beats, are the ones where Altman's presence is really felt.