The Company

You have to fiddle on the corner where the quarters are.

--Robert Altman

Why did it take me so long to see what was right there in front of my face -- that "The Company" is the closest that Robert Altman has come to making an autobiographical film? I've known him since 1970, have been on the sets of many of his films, had more than a drink with him in the old days and know that this movie reflects exactly the way he works -- how he assembles cast, story and location and plunges in up to his elbows, stirring the pot. With Altman, a screenplay is not only a game plan but a diversionary tactic, to distract the actors (and characters) while Altman sees what they've got.

"The Company" involves a year in the life of the Joffrey Ballet of Chicago, during which some careers are born, others die, romance glows uncertainly, a new project begins as a mess and improbably starts to work, and there is never enough money. The central characters are Ry (Neve Campbell), a promising young dancer; Harriet (Barbara E. Robertson), a veteran who has paid her dues and keeps on paying; Josh (James Franco), a young chef who becomes Ry's lover, and Alberto Antonelli (Malcolm McDowell), the company's artistic director.

It is said that "Mr. A" is based on Gerald Arpino, the Joffrey's legendary director and choreographer, and that no doubt is true. But there's another Mr. A standing right there in full view, and his name is Robert Altman.

"The Player" (1992) was Altman's film about the movie industry, an insider's look at the venality, ambition, romance and genius of Hollywood. But "The Company" is his film about the creative process itself, and we see that ballet, like the movies, is a collaborative art form in which muddle and magic conspire, and everything depends on that most fragile of instruments, the human body.

There is a moment early in the film when a French-Canadian choreographer named Robert Desrosiers pitches a project named "Blue Snake" to Mr. A, and he confesses himself baffled by the work and frightened by the budget. When Altman himself was pitched this screenplay by Neve Campbell and the writer Barbara Turner, he remembers saying: "Barbara, I read your script and I don't get it. I don't understand. I don't know what it is. I'm just the wrong guy for this."

But in "The Company" Mr. A finds a glimmer of something in the new ballet, a nugget of authenticity, and begins to play with it. For a long stretch in the middle of the film, we may suspect that "Blue Snake" is a satiric target, a work so absurd that Altman wants it for target practice. The dancers seem to disdain it. Desrosiers can be insufferable. And then somehow, inexplicably, the work falls into place and is actually very good.

The process by which both Misters A transform the material is the subject of the movie. At preview screenings of "The Company," some Joffrey supporters in the audience were disappointed by the choice of "Blue Snake" and wondered why Altman hadn't closed with one of the pieces for which the company has become famous (several of those works are seen in the movie, including Arpino's "Trinity"). But that would have missed the point. This is a movie, not a dance concert documentary -- the record not of a performance but of a process.

Altman is known for the way his camera tries to capture elusive moments as they happen. He uses overlapping dialogue, incomplete thoughts and unresolved actions, showing us life in development. This time, using the flexibility of a digital camera, he takes what he can use from a fusion of fiction and real life.

The love story between Ry and Josh doesn't take the foreground, as it might in a conventional film, but is part of the mix in the exhausting lives of the characters. They like each other, and the sex is great, but they're ambitious young professionals with crazy schedules, and there's a scene where Josh cooks an elaborate dinner for Ry, but she turns up very late, and he has already fallen asleep, and yes, that's about right: He had to cook, she had to be late, because of who they are.

The movie almost offhandedly shows us how hard dancers work. To be a dancer in the Joffrey, one of the most respected companies in the world, is itself back-breaking. But then see how Ry rushes out to her second job, as a waitress in a beer-and-burger joint. And see the second-floor flat she lives in, with the L trains roaring past right outside the window.

This is a different reality than the glamorous Monte Carlo existence in a ballet classic like "The Red Shoes." Altman observes the exhausting lifestyle, and then shows us the older dancer Harriet, who is nearing the end of her professional life, and has made such sacrifices for years because, well, because she is one of the very few people in the world who can dance as she dances, and so she must.