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Thursday, Nov 26, 2009
Robert Altman's surpassingly beautiful ballet movie feels lighter than air -- but in fact it's the great director's most tender and memorable film in years.
Dec 25, 2003 | Robert Altman has been moving large casts of characters smoothly through his movies and orchestrating passages of overlapping dialogue for so long now that he has often seemed as much choreographer as director. So it's fitting that he's gotten around to making a dance movie. "The Company," filmed with members of Chicago's Joffrey Ballet, must be the least flossy movie ever made about the world of dance. Ballet and modern dance haven't been particularly well served by the movies. There was Carroll Ballard's film of the Maurice Sendak-designed "Nutcracker," but mostly there are fragments: the Roland Petit ballet that opened "White Nights," and Mikhail Baryshnikov and Gregory Hines' Twyla Tharp-choreographed duet in the same movie; and the few precious moments of Baryshnikov dancing in the otherwise appalling "The Turning Point."
That stinker was pretty typical of the way the movies have always approached high art -- with genuflection and blandishments about the discipline and sacrifice to which the artiste must submit. Who needs it? I'd have traded all of it for the moment from the 2000 "Center Stage" where the statuesque Zoe Saldana uses the point of her toe shoes to stub out a cigarette. That image from a throwaway teen movie was connected to the details of real life in a way that movies about art rarely are. Who the hell can appreciate any art if you're made to feel that becoming an artist is joining the priesthood?
"The Company" has no more time for preachments about the nunnery of "the dahnce" than Altman's "Vincent and Theo" had for preachments about the priesthood of art. "The Company" isn't fevered and tortured the way "Vincent and Theo" was. It isn't about the agony of making art but about the pleasure of it. In this case, that pleasure is inseparable from the nearly sexual excitement of young people finding out what amazing things their bodies are capable of. Altman's movie is lighter than air, but it's also one of the most fluid expressions of his technique. You could say that it's all grace notes, but I prefer the description of my Salon colleague Stephanie Zacharek, that it's all pulses. A choreographer distills everything to movement; Altman distills the meaning of "The Company" to the movement.
Altman has never had any use for the theatrical method of introducing movie characters. It isn't surprising that he has no use for the conventions of backstage drama. The familiar plot strands in Barbara Turner's script -- the overbearing stage mother of a promising dancer, the young male dancer whose pushy mentor is jeopardizing his career, another young dancer who's shuttling from one crash pad to another -- are deliberately introduced so they can be left dangling. In conventional terms, nothing happens in "The Company." We watch the young dancers of the Joffrey rehearse, get picked (or not) for performance, fall in love, injure themselves, deal with their families, work their part-time jobs.
"The Company"
Directed by Robert Altman
Starring Neve Campbell, Malcolm McDowell, James Franco, the Joffrey Ballet of Chicago
When a dancer snaps a tendon demonstrating a move in rehearsal, Altman doesn't do what another director would, shifting the scene to the hospital while the company breathlessly awaits news of her condition. The girl is taken away to be cared for, her replacement is chosen and rehearsals continue. That's the reality of a dance company, not some ballet equivalent of "42nd Street." Nothing happens in "The Company," but only if you consider a master director's ability to put life on-screen nothing. At moments "The Company" recalls the work of the French director Jacques Rivette, whose long, seemingly inconsequential movies give the great gift of allowing audiences to live in, and savor, each moment.
Altman has always been a weird mix of humanism and cynicism. For all his ability to plumb the contradictions of his characters, he's always been susceptible to the caricatures of the adolescent wiseass. He hits a jarring note here in the scene where a dancer relates an anecdote about a relative's recent suicide, but for the most part "The Company" is one of the most celebratory movies he's ever made. Altman seems completely seduced by the young dancers on-screen. How could he not be? At 78 he's still working with an eagerness and vigor most filmmakers never attain. In the director's statement accompanying the press kit, Altman says, "On a daily basis and in the most impossible and dramatic terms, dancers face what we all face: biological clocks and the force of gravity telling us NO. Yet for some part of their working lives dancers literally prevail over those forces. The fact that they (like the rest of us) will all ultimately be trumped by time doesn't diminish or compromise their efforts."
For years now Altman has prevailed over not just his own biological clock but the forces that want to ground any independent-minded director working in American movies. Somehow, maybe through sheer stubbornness, he's kept making movies his way. Even at its most hit-and-miss, his career represents one of the least compromised that any major filmmaker has ever managed in this country.
One of Altman's tricks has been to deceive us with characters who seem like utter fools (like Geraldine Chaplin in "Nashville") only to have them say things that are anything but foolish. Here, as the director of the Joffrey, Malcolm McDowell spouts arty little pensées. He's the essence of every "resident genius" coasting on his associations and the showy panache of his dedication to art. This is one of those guys who knew just everyone (you expect him to talk about taking tea with Pavlova), who keeps his underlings at his beck and call and slyly hands them all the problems that arise, all the while insisting that he's the man in charge.
He seems to have no idea of the nuts and bolts of a performance, always swooping in to change bits and pieces of a dance, no matter that the clock is ticking and the movements have to be set. (I attended a college with a fairly renowned dance department, and the head of the department was always wandering into rehearsals a night or two before opening, insisting on lighting changes.) It's a hilarious caricature. But at the end of one of his speeches -- the old saw about how young people today can't understand what the '60s were really like -- he says, "Thinking the movement is not becoming the movement."
That could be a summation of the way Altman has always gambled on instinct -- even here, in the midst of a movie about one of the most disciplined of arts. Altman knows when not to interfere. He allows us to observe rehearsals, the painstaking process by which phrases of movement cohere into a dance. And then, just as his movies have always done, he erases all the evidence of that work with the seeming effortlessness of the final product.
