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God, I want to fuck a dancer. This is libidinous
piece of information that I learned by watching The Company,
the new ballet drama directed by the great Robert Altman and
“written by” Neve Campbell and Barbara Turner. This
is my new goal in life. I have fallen completely in lust with
the long, skinny, sinewy bodies of professional dancers. No
more staring through the window at the pilates class down
the street from my house. No more sitting at home alone, late
at night, masturbating to nakedgymnast.com. I want a professional
ballerina in my bed, and I damn it, I want one now.
In one of the opening scenes of The Company, director
Altman lets us into the dressing room of these ballerinas,
and we see the entire company (both sexes) in various states
of undress. Robert Altman may be 78 years old but he’s
still got it! Not two minutes into the movie and he grabs
the audience’s attention with some bare tit. It’s
good to know I’ve got the exact same instincts as one
of the greatest living American directors.
Unfortunately, Altman quickly loses our attention after that
and never quite gets it back. It’s tough to live up to
the initial excitement of bare tit, but Robert Altman’s
been making movies for over 40 years, and I would think that
if any director could do it, he could. But for some reason,
despite Altman’s best efforts, The Company just
didn’t work. Maybe it was because after the initial locker
room tease, the closest we got to a good nude scene was Neve
Campbell behind a curtain in a bubble bath. Or maybe it was
because, in making a film about a ballet company, Altman chose
to do so without any semblance of a plot.
Supposedly, this was intentional on Altman’s part. He
has been quoted as saying that he didn’t want to do the
typical “chorus girl gets her big chance in the spotlight”
story. This is good; Altman is the last director I’d
expect to conform to those kinds of clichés. However,
he doesn’t put anything in its place. This is probably
because while Robert Altman directed the film, it wasn’t
his “baby." The real driving force behind this film
was Neve Campbell, who wanted to show the world that she can
do more than run and scream. So she and screenwriter Barbara
Turner (Campbell gets a “story by” credit) hung
out with the Chicago’s Joffrey Ballet Company (members
of which appear in the film as themselves) for a year, and
then based the movie on the dancers’ stories.
Another thing I learned from watching The Company:
dancers are fucking boring. They have nothing important or
interesting to say-- ever. And they’re so fucking vain
they make me want to poke their eyes out as I’m fucking
their beautiful sinewy bodies. Dancers spend their mornings
stretching, their afternoons leaping and their evenings smoking
cigarettes and having sex with each other (but not me). They
spend their lives in front of mirrors. No wonder they’re
so vain. they probably think this review’s about them...
Another thing I learned from watching The Company:
dancers are also fucking idiots. They’re dumber than
a bag of hammers. Duller than donuts. Stupider than…
something that’s really stupid and starts with the letter
“s”. They have no opinions on anything other than
themselves. They don’t read. They don’t follow current
events. You want to make a dancer cry? Tell them they can’t
look at themselves in a mirror until they’ve read the
entire Sunday New York Times. They’re not even all that
good at talking. In the film, Campbell and her boyfriend,
played by JamesThey Franco, meet and fall in love without
ever talking to each other. While some might view this as
the perfect relationship, I just found it to be boring.
This is the main reason why The Company ultimately
failed as a film. Robert Altman’s modus operandi is to
put a bunch of talented actors in a room, give them a bare
bones script, and have them improvise around the story. He
uses virtuosic tracking and panning cameras, and a complicated
layered soundtrack to add to detail to his films. His movies
are truly ensemble pieces. Actors love working with him, and
it is this filmmaking technique that made such films as M*A*S*H*,
Nashville, The Player, Short Cuts, and Gosford Park the classics
that they are.
However, there’s a great difference between having Lily
Tomlin and Bob Balaban in your ensemble (for example) than
having dialogue improvised by a couple of nineteen-year -olds
who are really good at standing on one foot. As a result,
most of the scenes in this film consist of a room full of
blindingly attractive people, staring blankly at themselves
in the mirror, like cows before slaughter. Really attractive
cows that stretch a lot.
There are good things in The Company, besides all the
sexy cows. It has some of the best-shot dance sequences I’ve
ever seen in a film. These sequences are so good that they
almost carry the rest of the film’s clunk. There is also
Malcolm McDowell, who is amusing as the artistic director
of the ballet company. Yet the fact that he is so good at
his job of, well, acting, makes him stand out from the rest
of the cast, like a redheaded Jane Goodall, living in the
jungle, surrounded by a bunch of hairy gorillas. Really good-looking
gorillas. Who can stand on one foot.
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Above:
Neve Campbell demonstrates that dancers are basically dunces
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