Films about performance troupes and the artistic process typically begin on the level of character, allowing the audience to connect with one or two particular artists before gradually spiraling outward into the specific world they inhabit. Robert Altman’s The Company completely inverts (and subverts) this long-standing cinematic tendency, opening in the middle of a ballet performance and consistently eliding plot and character in favor of taking a more holistic view of the titular ballet company. It is a film that remains unflinchingly focused on process, including virtually every element that goes into preparing for and putting on a series of performances. Following no traditional narrative arc, The Company instead deftly and seamlessly weaves between the on-stage and off-stage domains, financial concerns and interpersonal conflicts and individual injuries to wide-scale collaborations to create an elegant tapestry of this particular, insular world.
Employing the Joffrey Ballet of Chicago, Altman garners a documentary-like realism right off the bat as the film fluidly veers from the opening performance to various rehearsal spaces and offices, casually obliterating the line between above and below the line talent and slyly positioning virtually every person on-screen as essential to the functioning of the ballet company. This egalitarian approach extends even to Altman’s use of stars, specifically Neve Campbell, playing the up-and-coming dancer Ry, who doesn’t even utter a complete sentence until 30 minutes in. The many rehearsal sequences rarely focus on a single performer and Altman’s frequent use of wide shots and roving camerawork that has a dance-like quality all its own, allows, or perhaps invites, the eye to wander and see everyone playing their particular part, be it star, understudy, teacher or student.
Altman has shown a clear fondness for ensemble casts over the years in everything from Nashville and A Wedding to O.C. and Stiggs and Short Cuts, but The Company marks a distinctly self-reflexive shift in his work. Malcolm McDowell’s loveably cantankerous Mr. A, the company’s director, is clearly Altman’s on-screen avatar in both name, personality, and leadership role. If The Company can be said to have a perspective, it is certainly his. Mr. A’s slightly enigmatic persona, acerbic wit and commanding yet laid back presence are all reflections of Altman himself and more than any film in the director’s canon, this one is his strongest and most direct statement about his approach to filmmaking.
A crucial aspect of this point is Altman’s relentless curiosity about every member and division of the company, which he examines like a diamond ever-turning in the light, revealing new facets with each additional scene. The sublimation of stars is also essential to this approach and it’s rather telling that neither Campbell nor McDowell ever threaten to steal the spotlight, often remaining subsumed in whatever group of people are on screen at a given moment. Ry’s romantic entanglement with a professional chef (James Franco) comes into play only in fits and starts, while Mr. A’s managerial practices offer insights into the various nuts and bolts that keep the company up and running rather than an endless opportunity for scene-stealing bravado akin to, say, J.K. Simmons in Whiplash.
If Altman’s willingness to drift from scene to scene lends the film a certain aimlessness, which detractors have labeled as unfocused, it is this very lack of narrative propulsion that gives the film its acute observational power. It is a film full of digressions that most other directors would have left on the cutting room floor. Scenes where one dancer, whose name barely registers, begs a friend to let him crash at her apartment for a couple nights or another where a dancer argues vehemently with Mr. A over being ousted as the lead in the next production do nothing to further the plot in any traditional sense. But each scene that is unnecessary in the traditional sense adds to the film’s meticulous construction of its milieu, with everything from the mundane to the elaborate leading to a greater understanding of its totality.
Even the film’s most memorable sequence – a pas de deux with Ry and a male dancer, who, performing on an outdoor stage, elegantly power through their performance as a storm peppers the stage with leaves and rain – serves this goal, despite featuring only two performers. This scene introduces another of the many unknowns that can impact a particular performance – a later scene explores the different impact that a mid-show injury has – but it is also filmed with such poetic beauty that it captures the more transportive and transfixing qualities of ballet that are rarely communicated in the rest of the film.
At its heart, The Company is a reflection on the adaptive spirit required for collaboration, especially on any sort of large scale, and a celebration of the inspiration that can spring from the unexpected. As Altman has done in most of his best films, here he remains open to fortuitous events, allowing them to shape, or reshape, a given scene. It’s a quality that Altman has been criticized for by many over the years – what John Carpenter called “flogging around in the swamps” – and in The Company, the director has not only doubled down on it, but completely owns it as his modus operandi. As such, it’s not terribly surprising that more than most of his films, this one is particularly divisive.
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