Altman’s dance film falls flat

Look at Joffrey Ballet in ‘Company’ makes misery for viewers

By Pat Holmes

The Portland Tribune, Jan 16, 2004, Updated Oct 30, 2009

To call a particular piece of cinema “an old man’s film” is not necessarily disparaging.

In the case of a work like Akira Kurosawa’s “Ran,” John Ford’s “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance” or even Clint Eastwood’s “Mystic River,” it can mean a work free of concession or compromise, beholden to none, graced with a wealth of accumulated wisdom. Then again, it can mean a film that’s more than a little wobbly and slow, unsure of eye and ear, with a tendency to wander aimlessly.

Sadly, the latter seems most applicable to Robert Altman’s “The Company,” which showcases many of the director’s faults but too few of his virtues. Or maybe it displays how close the two can be.

Since his glory days in the ’70s, Altman’s career has remained of interest partly because of its spottiness Ñ or, if you prefer, its variety. Pushing 80, having long since bolted the major studios, he has become one of America’s grand old mavericks, justly celebrated for his longevity and high yield (probably outpaced only by Woody Allen). His last film, “Gosford Park,” was one of his best since his heyday. “The Company” is easily one of his worst.

Meandering fuzzily Ñ in literal and figurative terms Ñ through a season with Chicago’s Joffrey Ballet, “The Company” is a pet project of its star, Neve Campbell, who has trained as a ballerina. She receives a story credit, which is probably explained by her executive producer credit, since there is no story. And she’s not so much the star as just the person we see most often in this series of episodes interspersed with dance numbers.

Campbell is a weightless presence, which is probably good for a ballerina but not for an actor Ñ or an audience looking for something to hold such a gauzy construct on the screen.

For that you look to Malcolm McDowell, inexplicably cast as the Italian-American director of the company (you keep expecting him to break out in “Clockwork Orange” droogspeak) and the only one who emerges from this thin soup as anything like a character. And he may have to share credit for that with the bright mufflers that are tossed with calculated casualness about his head and shoulders like an anaconda with a queer makeover.

Altman takes what might be called an eavesdropping style, though it lacks his usual sense of fluidity and interactive density. And his images (no pun on one of his better films) are unusually dim and soft, as if shot through a nylon stocking. Only the dance numbers come to life with the color, motion and purpose everything else lacks.

If the director is attempting to replicate a documentary, why not simply make a documentary?

Altman has made no secret of his disdain for narrative and genre conventions, though it is often those very things that keep him in line (“Gosford,” for example, or “The Long Goodbye” and “McCabe & Mrs. Miller”). Here the “personal” scenes between Campbell and nondescript boyfriend James Franco perform no function whatever as connective tissue or character enhancement. They’re like -watered-down Slim-Fast.

As the movie manages the seemingly impossible feat of being both flimsy and inert, Altman executes the perfect pas de dull.

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