Altman raises the barre with The Company.
In this latest exploration of an esoteric universe, Altman reveals his feelings about filmmaking as much as about dance or theater. The Company?like 1992's The Player?observes the work-a-day behavior of people involved in the creation of art and business. Set in Chicago at the Joffrey Ballet, the film follows a community of dancers and administrators preparing for a new season, interacting with one another's personal ambitions; different motivations clash or harmonize as in musical improvisation or dance notation. In his Van Gogh biography Vincent & Theo, Altman outlined the political economics of artistic production; similarly in The Company, Joffrey artistic director Mr. Antonelli (Malcolm McDowell) cautions a choreographer, "Budget, budget, budget." But The Company (note the title) especially keys in on the emotional economics at stake in the artistic world. Feelings get hurt, bodies get injured, intentions get misunderstood and careers fluctuate while each individual goes about in solitary pursuit of some internalized ideal.
Mr. Antonelli (called Mr. A, as Georges Balanchine's associates called him Mr. B) moves around like a circus ringmaster, but the young dancer Ry (Neve Campbell) provides the film's quietly ambitious emotional center. Ry isn't a star; she slips almost imperceptibly from the ballet corps into each new role she's assigned. She's most fully expressive when she dances. Yet she's always enigmatic, giving herself over to dancing deep human passions that cancel out her personality even while revealing her intimate self. Forget Julia Roberts?Campbell presents the season's most compelling Mona Lisa smile. She conveys the spirit behind every dancer's proverbial mask. And Altman attunes the movie to Ry's secretiveness.
Previously Altman's films highlighted the cinema's kinetic excitement. The most atmospheric modern filmmaker, he innovated multi-track vocal recording out of his appetite for the abundance of daily life. The hubbub and rush of ongoing conversations made Altman's movies unique, and the headiness was matched in his spacious, rectangular compositions. Now, in The Company, he pioneers an equally sensuous hush. The quiet of people?artists?deep in their own thoughts never seems attenuated like in Lost in Translation. Although action in The Company seems to happen at a remove, Altman's gift for life itself remains compelling. He sustains fascination?suspense?within the immediacy of dance performance.
Even the weather becomes an event. Ry dances a sensual ballet at an amphitheater while a rainstorm threatens. The outdoor audience may be watching a performance, distracted by the elements, but Ry (dancing to Marvin Laird's "My Funny Valentine") is transforming her loneliness into public longing. That's how she speaks?and it's crucial to recognize that here Altman photographs movement as language. During this outdoor dance, leaves that blow onto the stage catch the overhead lights and shimmer against the black backdrop, mixing reality with illusion. It's a spectacular culmination of the genuine stagecraft Altman acquired; ballet is spontaneously made into cinema.
The Company features the most elliptical narrative ever dared in a mainstream movie. It must be watched closely, with attention paid to rhyming images?such as Ry's receiving a memento from her aunt. It is a clock in the base of a small sculpture featuring a ballerina inside a tv set; later Ry's boyfriend, Josh (James Franco), discovers a home video of Ry dancing in a grade school pageant and is hooked on watching this revealing piece of his lover's history. (She changed her name from Loretta.) Altman complements the cerebration of ballet by making a dance musical that is always thematically and emotionally suggestive.
This is the quietest Altman movie ever, yet it is as busy as the others. He stresses our curiosity about the many unidentified folk (one's search for a condom leads to another's lament on the losses to AIDS); we simply come to recognize characters by picking up their routines. A red-haired company associate is first seen practicing at the barre before going to work. Her constant poise and balanced gait confirm our first glimpse of her and tell their own story of a life spent believing in dance. What other contemporary movie has shown such respect for the private life? Ry at home, exhausted and crying after a performance, is intercut with a male dancer sweating out a late-night rehearsal; his career concerns are revealed later, but Altman spotlights the fact of both artists' shared desperation.
We are watching life. That's The Company's great illusion, as full of color and complexity as any of the ballets that interweave the backstage scenes. These dances are a less obvious transposition of the performers' lives than the stage scenes were in Children of Paradise (1945) or even Mike Leigh's Topsy-Turvy. Altman and screenwriter Barbara Turner (who collaborated with Campbell) keep that aspect of creative endeavor secret. They're more interested in the flux of life. Altman's celebrated use of atmosphere is distilled into moody pantomime sequences?mood simply being the interplay of human temperaments. The sweet romance between Ry and Josh begins with a view of their part-time jobs (she moonlights as a dance-club waitress, while Josh's work as a chef is his own art pursuit). He flirts with her over a pool table (Elvis Costello's "My Funny Valentine" cuing us on the jukebox). Their pairing conveys the bitter mix of work and life. Franco's near-mute characterization is a touchingly eloquent depiction of young love.
All this goes against year-end hype about films of "importance" and "size." Altman has dared to make a "casual" masterpiece?a quiet, rhythmic film about essential things. The Company shames all previous ballet movies with a piercing, funny scene when Mr. A. receives an honor from a local Italian fraternal organization. McDowell, who has been punctilious throughout, summons a droll gravity to tell the group, "I really deserve this award... You Italian guys, you made it really hard for me to be a dancer." I hate to give this moment away, but it's important to appreciate the incisiveness of Antonelli's unexpected confession. We're not so sophisticated that a ballet movie can be viewed without the specter of homophobia. (The Red Shoes and The Turning Point looked askance.) Altman and McDowell rise above it, and their defiance is part of the film's delicate provocation. The male dancer's struggle is also part of the life The Company respects.
"Thinking in the movement is not becoming the movement," Mr. A tells his "babies." The Company miraculously makes viewers a part of each ballet. Altman achieves the best proscenium compositions since Gene Kelly's Hello, Dolly! This film can only be appreciated on the big screen because the scale of the dances must equal the profundity of the lives creating them?ultimate proof of Altman's theater-cinema connection. Ry and Josh's affair is followed by a vivid series of fast pas de deux, danced in red against blue. If this pulsating whirligig doesn't satisfy the essence of what you go to the movies for (vision, action, meaning), then you merely fall for the Hollywood hegemony of contrived plotting. These ballets abstract the life stories in The Company, but each one is rooted in feeling, then intensifies the emotion. Guy Maddin's ballet film Dracula: Pages from a Vampire's Diary didn't come close to this. (It was, frankly, a mess.)
Altman turns pieces by choreographers Robert Desrosiers and Lar Lubovitch into classic numbers. In one, a dancer lounging on a trapeze moves to the Julee Cruise recording "The World Spins." She swings like a pendulum across the breadth of the widescreen, and her white gown sweeps the stage. It's so diaphanous you can't believe it's real, yet the sound of her feet touching the floor becomes a dreamlike reminder of mortality. ("The World Spins" comes from David Lynch's great spooky pop album Floating into the Night, but Altman steals it the way Aretha Franklin took Otis Redding's "Respect." For Lynch fans who see The Company, "The World Spins" will now forever belong to Altman, who gives it a breathtaking visualization.)
Altman uses beauty to offset the arduousness of artistic creation. That's the theme of the final setpiece, a fantasy ballet featuring Sendakian figures?creatures from an artist's subconscious?dancing within reach of a devouring Moloch. This symbolizes the risks Altman has taken throughout his career. The biggest risk in The Company was Altman's shooting in digital video format Sony HDW-F900. I fought it, hating the frequent burn-outs and glare, until photographer Andrew Dunn turned white light to silvery iridescence. It's not sloppy; it's an esthetic?an Altman experiment converting video verite into cinema, a hypothesis like Godard's In Praise of Love. But here, the stage colors are saturated and vibrant unlike any other video movie; suddenly the flat backstage video images give way to a make-believe depth that is almost three-dimensional. The American in Paris ballet shot by legendary John Alton was not more beautiful than this. Dunn clarifies that the difference between film and video is akin to painters using watercolors or oils. Meticulous artists now have a choice. Altman's past movies prove that film is still the Gold Standard technique, yet The Company represents the gold standard of filmmaking.