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The Company review
:. Director: Robert Altman
:. Starring: Neve Campbell, Malcolm McDowell
:. Running Time: 1:52
:. Year: 2003
:. Country: USA
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The arrival of a new Robert Altman movie is always an event, at least for the cinephiles who, throughout decades, fed on his uncompromising and satirical vision of the world and need their Altman fix on a yearly basis. Just like fellow filmmaker Woody Allen, his delivery is uneven, alternating between the great and the anecdotal, but his soul remains in each of his film, thus always providing some exciting moments, however flawed the work may be.
Altman has mastered the art of studying social microcosms, and even though I wasn't bouncing around at the idea of going to see a film about the ballet world—its mere evocation puts me in a state of sleepiness close to comatose—the association of the director and actor Malcolm McDowell was led me to expect that this explosive formula would bring incandescence to the screen.
Co-written and co-produced by the charming but light-weight actress Neve Campbell, who explained at the premiere how this story is inspired by her experience as a dancer, the film follows the life of the famous Joffrey ballet from Chicago through the eyes of the dancer Ry (Campbell) and the ballet director (McDowell).
The Company can certainly be credited for showing a facet of Altman we have rarely seen before: his use of a camera as a tool to capture beauty. The camera movements are fluid and rich, following the dance of these bodies on stage, absorbing the vivid colors of decor and costumes, and offering a few moments of grace such as during the number under the storm.
However, Altman—the director we love and respect—is nowhere to be found here, totally absent from a movie that carries his name. From the beginning we get the feeling that he abandoned the characters-and us-to focus on the representation of art. His characters are flat, hardly drawn. They are ghosts traversing a film, filling in between extensive numbers.
Ry gets a chance to be in the spotlight, lands a boyfriend, twists her ankle and the film ends, bringing the shocking and painful realization that nothing happened in this The Company. Not only don't we really learn anything about the behind-the-stage life of dancers—even the underrated Showgirls did a better job of it—except that they are poor, living for Art, and sometimes share a small apartment like a colony of hippies. The few attempts at satire are too soft and vain, by the film's the script makes sure to reinstate the rare characters who were made fun of. McDowell has nothing to bite into: his character is rude but ultimately just pushing for perfection while the show director's ridiculous jungle idea proves to be successful on stage.
It's obvious that Altman and writer/actress Campbell aimed at giving the film a documentarial look, but in the process Altman lost his soul, and the film lost Altman.
Fred Thom
 Movie Reviews: from 1998 to 2011
Movie Reviews: from 2012 to present
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