'The Company' captures pliés, relevés of dancer's life
Altman, who's been making movies for half a century, seems to be looking at the dance world with the freshness of one experiencing the art for the first time. A master of intricate, ensemble-driven dramas ("Nashville," "Gosford Park"), he's here gone in the other direction, crafting a movie so free of plot it almost seems to be floating, like those ballerinas in the arms of their partners.
In Barbara Turner's screenplay, Ry (Neve Campbell) is a dancer in Chicago's acclaimed Joffrey Ballet. She takes classes, she rehearses, she performs, she soaks in hot baths, she waitresses part time at a local club, she embarks on a sweetly understated romance with a young chef (James Franco).
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And that's about it — no real conflict, no melodrama, just a slice of a young artist's life, seasoned by the constant awareness that everything could change in a heartbeat. We're seeing Ry on the cusp of her career; she's not yet a principal dancer, nor an unknown in the background. She's junior enough to need that second job, senior enough to be carefully watched by those beneath her on the company's precisely defined ladder, and to be singled out for a key role when another dancer is injured.
What shines through "The Company" is a love of dance — both from the elegantly calm Campbell (a classically trained dancer offscreen) and from the filmmakers, who seem to respect the art of ballet too much to clutter it up with the kind of backstage drama in which ballet movies usually traffic.
Instead of broken hearts and over-the-top divas (though Malcolm McDowell swans around nicely as the company's temperamental director, who wears foofy scarves and is always shouting, "OK, babies!"), we're given lovingly photographed dance sequences that show us the ease in a seemingly impossible art. The dancers stretch like cats in sunlight, pointing their toes like beautiful contortionists.
"My Funny Valentine," the melancholy Lar Lubovitch pas de deux that serves as the centerpiece of the film (with the choreographer playing himself in the rehearsal scenes), perfectly blends the art of dance and the art of film. Danced by Campbell and Domingo Rubio, accompanied by onstage jazz musicians, it's set on an outdoor stage during an autumn storm; leaves blow against the couple as they writhe and twist to the music, as if wanting to join the dance. Campbell, her hair blowing against her pale face, drapes herself weightlessly around Rubio's body; it's as if, on that dark stage, they're the only two people in the world.
Plenty of other tasty dance tidbits pepper "The Company." There's Robert Desrosiers' wildly over-the-top "The Blue Snake"; Moses Pendleton and Cynthia Quinn's wistful "White Widow," in which a lone ballerina spins on a swing; and the uncanny precision of Alwin Nikolais' "Tensile Involvement," in which dancers trap themselves in weblike boxes spun from elastic bands. (Nikolais' dance was choreographed 50 years ago — around the time that Altman got started in movies — but feels miraculous as ever, perhaps because of the director's dazzled eye.)
Plot? Who needs a plot? "The Company" is a loving tribute to artists, and to art.
Moira Macdonald: 206-464-2725 or mmacdonald@seattletimes.com