Company

The DVD extras with some movies make the film seem better than it did just watching it. "The Company" is a good example.

I'd wondered, briefly, why star Neve Campbell also got producer credit. The DVD 'making of' documentary explains that the whole project was her idea; she'd been a dancer long before she took up acting, and wanted to combine the two. She chose Altman to direct, because of his skill at portraying relations and interactions among people in groups.

Altman did a fine job depicting dance, both rehearsals and performances. Campbell showed she can still dance. Malcolm McDowell gave a great performance as the acerbic company director. The Joffrey dancers were brilliant. Altman has created a dazzling cinematic album of what the world of dance is like at the beginning of the 21st century.

But the story arc was weak. This was no accident. In a recent (October 2004) interview, Altman said:

Question: "Why do you think you're drawn to stories about big groups of people sharing the same space? Did it have anything to do with growing up in such a large, close-knit family?"

Robert Altman: "Possibly. I don't know. That's a little too cerebral for me. I'm not much interested in stories anyway. I'm more interested in reactive behavior."

That sums up "The Company" very nicely. The movie is a montage of scenes of "reactive behavior" among realistic characters, and in this it is more like real life than a more structured story would have been.

Of course there is some story structure here, involving the creation of a new dance. This story is engaging, because the outside choreographer is a fey flake, and dance disaster seems foredoomed. But the dancers, being good soldiers, follow his orders diligently. And despite all expectations, at least all of my expectations, their climactic performance is superb.

But this story is not central to the movie. Again like life, it unfolds amidst all sorts of other organizational and interpersonal drama.

And for this reason the movie left me unsatisfied. Part of what I look for in movies, and in books, is a story arc: a beginning, a middle, and an end. I look for this precisely because life is rarely that neat. Many directors deliver this arc (and many more try to, and fail). Robert Altman chose not to try. He is free to do that, and I am free to rate this movie 7/10.

Some of the dances are tiny religious experiences. The film doesn't look nearly as good as some of Altman's others, but there are flashes of awesome beauty: a topless male dancer alone in a room with golden beams of light, and Neve Campbell in her bath. The movie looks at the queeny pretensions of the boys (and their fathers), the dancers' sex lives (who are more '60s than their instructor knows), and the company leader, played by Malcolm McDowell, whose occasional flakiness is caught by one black dancer. I couldn't help but think of McDowell as an Altman self-criticism: an elderly director working with small budgets, prone to artiness, who champions art as being organic, who rounds up a large crew of performers and calls them "babies." The day-in-the-life shapelessness of the movie didn't at all bother me, though one character, who asks to stay in a dancer's apartment, is dropped pretty quickly. And James Franco is in it. 9/10

The Company is far below the level of Robert Altman's best efforts. In contrast with Gosford Park's endlessly fascinating chatter weaving an intricate web of intrigues and secrets, there's much stretching and dancing, but very little delving into the backgrounds or relationships of the principals. There's hardly what you could call a plot. There are only a few strong characters. All you really get to hold things together somehow or provide some sense of continuity is a series of things that go wrong:

(1) Among the many dance `numbers,' the one that stands out is the first, an outdoor performance featuring the Hollywood actress Neve Campbell (Scream 1,2, and 3, Wild Things), a trained dancer and the force behind the making of the whole film. A thunderstorm comes to buffet the audience and the dancers. The dancers bravely go on and the dance -- so we're told, anyway -- is a triumph. The entire sequence is dominated by a sense of impending disaster. A slippery stage could have meant serious injury. One also wonders about damage to valuable string instruments being played in the open to accompany the dance. All this is extremely distracting and excruciating to watch. Altman does succeed though in giving us a sense of what performances are like from the company's point of view -- struggles with physical problems; successful efforts (at best) to avert disaster.

(2) An injury forces a new lead dancer to give up a role. This happens twice. We realize that dancers constantly face injury, or, as often, are dangerously in denial that they have one.

(3) Another sort of injury prevents a dancer from performing the whole of a `number.' This happens to Neve Campbell at the end of the movie. It's just an arm injury, so not career-threatening, but enough to require a quick replacement by a stand-in.

(4) A young man is replaced, but only for the latter part of a dance he's in -- because his energy seems to flag at that point in the performance. This nonetheless results in a terribly bruised ego for the young man and his union rep promises to lodge a formal protest. We get a sense of the constant threats to the ego in such an arbitrarily run system, along with the surprising news that union redress may be available in such cases.

(5) One of the guys in the company takes a new girlfriend. This time again it's Neve Campbell who's the `injured' one, and at a post-performance celebration she delivers an `I was the last to know' speech to the bad boy. I saw nods of agreement from dancerly-looking audience members during this moment.

(6) The aging female lead dancer - she's 43 - repeatedly protests about too-challenging new dances and refuses to make changes in the choreography of old ones. This potentially interesting, possibly tragic, theme of aging in what is really one of the world's most demanding sports is, however, only briefly touched on.

(7) An argument occurs between the director and one dancer, who hates choreography of a dance he's in, in which men wearing skirts `give birth' -- and the director instantly reverses what he said about how to perform this moment the day before. The director is adamant, the dancer has lost his cool, and the conversation breaks down. He frequently ends unsatisfactory conversations by dismissing his interlocutor. The director's rule is autocratic and rarely challenged. However the company does get mild revenge toward the end in a mock restaging of the season's events at a party.

All this adds up to something so generic and uninteresting as emotional truth or human experience that you are deeply grateful when at least the main dancer character, Neve Campbell, gets hooked up with a cook boyfriend, the intriguing James Franco. You're thankful for one young male movie star in the piece, because the real dancer `actors' - as usual - have very little presence or ability as actors. All James Franco gets to do is smile, kiss the girl, take off his shirt, and break some eggs. He does these things with lots of charm and charisma, but these are just crumbs tossed to us. The point however seems to be that dancers don't have time for much more than quick sex; it's like smoking a cigarette, something squeezed in.

Altman's casts are usually heavy with talent. This time there are only three leads, Campbell, McDowell, and Franco. Ironically only the least used, Franco, has any real appeal.

Ms. Campbell is little more than bustling and workmanlike. She has a few minutes with her pushy stage mother that provide some sense of relationships outside the company, but it's not enough.

You will have a lot of trouble with this movie if you don't like Malcolm McDowell. As the `Italian' company director Alberto Altonelli, he is brusque, bossy, obtrusive -- really just a flaming a**hole with a lot of power to abuse. Is this how dance companies work? Where's the genius? Why does young Franco have more charisma and sex appeal? And what's this about a ceremony in which the blatantly English McDowell gets an award for `honoring the Italian-American community'? Okay; let's pretend that he's Italian. But do we have to pretend he has no English accent? If that weren't bad enough, his little speech about not discouraging their sons from becoming ballet dancers is jarring and crude, like all his speeches: it's the height of ingratitude, and you wonder how anyone so undiplomatic could get money for his company. Is it just possible that McDowell is a jarring and crude actor? His performance is wooden and unsubtle. All he has to qualify for this role is forcefulness. Granted, he has that. But his scenes are nothing but irritations.

This is, at best, a generic treatment of an American ballet company. But it fails even on that level. How come none of the male dancers, not one, is shown to be gay? Isn't that a bit unrealistic about the culture of dance? Why the pretense that they're all straight, vying to have sex with the female dancers in the company?

Neve's partner after their triumph in the rain has a private improv session unwinding to a Bach solo cello suite. It's rather fun - and would have worked better if it had been allowed to run by itself and not been constantly intercut with the scene of Neve in her apartment - a huge Hollywood-style creation right by the `El' with a glam bath. The improvised Bach session makes you realize that Flash Dance was better than this. There was another movie about a dance company, featuring real dancers again, that was better than this. It had a bit more plot, and perhaps better dances; the people seemed a tad more real as people - and yet it wasn't a great movie. Altman's film has spectacular dance sequences at the beginning and the end but they're just staging, not great dance, and they're window dressing to cover up the emptiness of the whole production.

If you love dance and/or Altman you'll doubtless have to see this picture, but you won't be watching a particularly memorable ballet movie or getting Altman even at his average level.

George, what I think you meant to say was that you are actually a thick-headed mocho-man who has NO appreciation for the arts whatsoever. If you did, you'd understand that the ballet dancing in this movie was beautiful, and entitled a lot of hard work on the dancers' part. I've danced since I was three, and have met many male dancers along the way, and, to inform you, NOT ONE OF THEM WAS GAY! I'm a STRAIGHT female who has dated a male dancer before. Assumptions like that are completely childish. THe acting, dancing, setting, and costumes in this movie were wonderful. If you can't even appreciate fine movie-making, then you are surely at a loss. Even if you would rather be watching sports, which I completely understand, most men would, that's fine: however, it doesn't give you the right to judge an a form of art that you abviously don't understand.

"The Company" is a lovely commercial for the Joffrey Ballet of Chicago (for New Yorkers this is in fact the same modern ballet company that used to be based at City Center but left the competitive dance fund raising environment here to have the stage to itself in Chicago).

A labor of love for producer/story writer/star/former dancer Neve Campbell, she was determined to make the first film about a whole company, not just using the dance world for a backdrop of individual melodrama, and with long passages of actual performances. So she brought in the primo director of ensembles, Robert Altman. But clearly she made compromises to get the film made that put his creativity as a director in a straight jacket and only lets his trademark talents fleetingly shine through.

The key was getting the Joffrey's cooperation and I can only imagine the tough negotiations that resulted in this pretty much being a whitewash of the ballet world, or of any creative endeavor, in sharp contrast to the behind-the-scenes reality shows "Project Greenlight" on HBO or "The Fire Within" about Cirque du Soleil's "Varekai" that was on Bravo. I surmise a long list of thou shalt not's that appear to include items such as:

-- no views of the non-artistic administrators, board, or fund raisers (there's a passing exhortation to a flashy choreographer Robet Desrosiers to stay within the budget, but he gets the complicated costumes and sets he wants anyway);

-- no homosexual relationships (there's a passing reference to the dancers AIDS has taken including "Bob", which cognoscenti have to know refers to the company's founder Robert Jeffrey, and Malcolm McDowall as the egotistical artistic director "Alberto Antonelli," a stand-in presumably for current company director Gerald Arpino, urges fellow Italian-American men not to make their boys, like he had to, "hide their ballet shoes");

-- no eating disorders (we do twice hear "Mr. A," half-jokingly, urge the company to eat salads and vegetables and there's one fast, quiet exchange in passing that I think was about diet pills);

-- blame dancers' problems on dysfunctional parents and mentors, recalling that vivid song from "A Chorus Line" - "Everything was beautiful at the ballet" as dancers seek to escape messy situations through temporary perfect beauty.

Altman does get to assert his artistic priorities in a few ways. He effectively seizes on the ageism in dance, showing that it's not just the tyranny of aging bodies, as would affect any athlete, but that dancers with experience speak up for themselves and are more difficult to control in a viciously autocratic environment than ambitious, financially desperate, and, literally, pliable young dancers.

It's also the first time I've seen a camera expose the swarm of acolyte assistants to the director, revealing them as ex-dancers whom "Mr. A" still dismissively calls "babies" and who resent the new stars even as they dance vicariously through them.

The other beautiful Altman touch is when the significant character developments take place not center stage in a crowd but through a look or line happening way in the corner of the screen, like the expression on James Franco, as Cambell's chef beau, when she avoids introducing him to her family amidst a rush of congratulators.

But visually and musically the Joffrey is a wonderful choice, as the choreographers represented range from Arpino to Alwin Nikolais to Laura Dean and MOMIX. A centerpiece danced by Campbell is a sexy Lar Lubovitch pas de deux to the signature song "My Funny Valentine" which is used as a leitmotif, for reasons that still seem murky to me after hearing Altman explain why on "Charlie Rose," throughout the film in versions also by Elvis Costello, Chet Baker, and the Kronos Quartet. The music ranges from classical to jazz to the ethereal pop of Julee Cruise, Mark O'Connor's in-between "Appalachia Waltz", and the lovely score by Van Dyke Parks.