MOVIE CRITIQUE:
Of all the performance arts, grand opera is my very favorite as a great opera will consist of the finest singers, the greatest music, good acting, and, occasionally, even some wonderful dance scenes, usually provided by an outside dance company. It must be admitted, however, that scenes with ballet performances are not at all common in classic opera.

Ballet is my second favorite of the performance arts. While the beauty and the magnificence of the human voice is missing, there will always be gorgeous music to inspire the dancers to do their very best. But the most inspiring sight of all is to watch the human body being stretched to its very limit in the performance of the rigorous demands of dancing. When this is done well by gorgeous young adults at the peak of their physical prowess after years of training, the effect is just sublime.

It seems like a movie featuring some aspect of ballet comes along about every ten years or so. "Turning Point"(1977), "White Nights"(1985), "Center Stage"(2000) and now, "The Company," the new take on modern dance presented by famed director Robert Altman and featuring the Joffrey Ballet of Chicago.

Neve Campbell, a minor film star but a former ballerina, has collaborated with Barbara Turner on the novel and Barbara Turner has followed up with a screenplay on which Altman has based this movie. This is not a normal Altman film with dozens of characters like his brilliant "Gosford Park"(2000) or "A Wedding"(1978). It is more closely aligned with some of his small films that paint a minor canvas of the human condition like "Cookie's Fortune"(1999) and the rather lamentable "Dr. T and the Women"(2000).

"The Company" follows the tradition of Altman's smaller films as it is a small movie with very few speaking roles and almost none worthy of note beyond Neve Campbell as the "primo ballerina" with a dance company run by the imperious Alberto Antonelli (Malcolm McDowell).

When you love something or someone, you always want to know more about it or them. This curiosity is a natural part of the universal human condition. So it is with me and what goes on behind the scenes to produce a modern masterpiece in ballet. Altman has selected the Joffrey Ballet of my home town here in Chicago after their move here from New York City some years back. This is one import that I am thrilled to have and now Altman honors our new resident dance company by featuring them in this film.

Some of the dance sequences are just exquisite, especially the opening number involving the weaving of ribbons in geometric forms as the dancers move about the stage. A klutz like me would trip and fall over the very first strand of ribbon, but these graceful dancers manage to pull this off very beautifully. I tried to catch the name of this dance, but there were so many dances listed in the credits that I was unable to ascertain which one this is.

"The Company" is about what goes on to make a great night at the ballet by a company of dancers. The long hours of training, the many clashes of egos behind the scenes, the petty squabbles between the dancers, the cheap lifestyle of the dancers as artists who are always underpaid for what they do, the omnipresent danger of serious injury that might end their careers, and the constant chase for money by management, who themselves are always schmoozing for an extra buck to pull all of this off.

In summary, the dancers are always living on the edge of serious injury as they push their bodies to serve ever higher the cause of dancing while their autocratic bosses in the management of the company bow ever lower to potential donors to scrape together another buck or two so that all of this magic can fall into place for another night of dancing (performed in these instances at the spectacularly beautiful and acoustically perfect Auditorium Theater of Chicago).

What "The Company" is NOT is a story about the lives and loves of the dancers. This is a movie about the dance, nothing more and nothing less. Everything else besides the "how" and "why" of ballet dancing is peripheral in this movie.

As such, what we have here is a slice of life about a company of dancing and its constituent dancers. But this is more than enough for me with my being able to see all these dance sequences as beautiful as the many filmed in this movie along with having the back stage stories of practice and politics thrown in.

"The Company" is extravagantly lush and beautiful and a wonderful and loving paean to ballet, one of the greatest of the performing arts.
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MOVIE SYNOPSIS:
The camera drops into an ongoing saga of dance personalities and leaves them while they still are doing the same. Very little is seen outside the dance hall or of the personal lives of the dancers.

Loretta "Ry" Ryan (Neve Campbell) starts a tender relationship with a sous chef at what looks like Charlie Trotter's restaurant, but these two kids have neither the time nor the ability to pursue much of a relationship as both work long hours and their performances are always in the evening.

This movie does not really care how their love life progresses, only how "Ry" will be able to perform at the next dance of the company coping with what will turn out to be her many injuries on the job. As such, her romance is presented without being explored by Altman as are the personal relationships of all of the dancers. Even those with their doting parents are of little interest in the pursuit of a more complete portrait of the behind the scenes look at the inner workings of a dance company.

Ry herself has to hold a second job, a late evening job as a waitress at a near north side bar, to help make ends meet. Here she is one of the stars of the ballet company and a dancer under the constant threat of a career ending injury, and she isn't even paid enough to allow her to pay her own bills.

Another small vignette has to do with a new dancer moving into an already crowded apartment, an apartment so crowded that he has to sleep on the floor with the single wash room on a time share plan.

But the most important figure in this film is the autocratic boss of the company, Alberto Antonelli (Malcolm McDowell), a flamboyant gray haired personage who is never without his signature yellow scarf wrapped around his neck. He compliments some of his dancers when necessary, puts down others who have the temerity to question his judgment or his authority to do as he wishes, and otherwise does everything necessary to keep the dance company running like a well oiled machine.

And the oil that that machine runs on is money. The physical plant has to be kept up, dancers have to be instructed as to where they will fit in this new dance or that new hierarchy. Choreographers have to have their proposals for a new ballet put on hold until a donor is found to fund the project. And there is always the danger of a star dancer falling prey to a sudden injury necessitating a quick substitution by a hopefully capable understudy.

Everyone associated with the process both on the stage and working behind the scenes at the dance company lives on the edge in order to make those nights when the curtain goes up and the lights dim look as well polished and as effortless as possible. It's all really quite extraordinary.