Opens Fri Jan 16.
In The Company, Robert Altman dumps us in the middle of things and lets us find our own way out--nothing new for Altman fans (and detractors), for it is pretty much a sure bet that in an Altman film, you are not going to be introduced to the story's main problem via an expository conversation around the dinner table, the kind in which what's at stake is laid out by the people who have the most to lose or gain. In fact, if there's going to be any kind of expository conversation, it's probable that Altman will make sure that it's as unlikely and distracting as possible, that Julianne Moore will deliver it obliquely and bottomless (as she did in Short Cuts), or that Geraldine Chaplin's documentarian character will search for it against the flow of the film, as she did in Nashville, trying to boil the story down to its essentials when the movie wants to meander along at its own pace and let people live as people do.

This may be because what's at stake in film (as, it must be said, in life) is too fleeting and too complicated to be revealed in one neat conversation. The Company is about a dance company, and the story, such as it is, is a composite of what the director of the company wants, and what the dancers want, and what the people who are related to and love the dancers want, and pretty much above all that, what dance wants.

The Company is very much a dance movie, but not in the sentimental way that The Turning Point was. This is to say that you'll see a lot of dance, much of it lovely (one of the performances is absolutely wacko, although hailed as genius--a paradox left to the audience to puzzle out), threaded in among the lives and rehearsals of the movie's characters like a kind of fever dream--rising out of the everyday, a better, more beautiful, more artful version of normal interaction. It might be that the subject of this film, rather than being "about" characters, is what it means to do something very, very well, to make it look easy, and what might be given up in the process--although none of these dancers, one feels, would trade dance for normal life.

Nominally, this is the story of Ry (Neve Campbell), a dancer of apparent promise, but it could have been the story of any one of the dancers in the company. (The other roles are played by real dancers in the Joffrey Ballet.) Everyone is introduced with the same sort of importance (or lack of importance); similarly, details are framed portentously, even if nothing comes of them later. Time bumps along; seasons pass. Conversations are overheard, half-heard, buried under other noise. If you were inclined to, you could see this film (and others in Altman's oeuvre) as a critique of conventional filmmaking, of how we let things like the way a shot is framed shape our expectations of how a story develops. To watch a film like The Company is to have those expectations led down the garden path again and again.

It makes the film on the one hand slight, but on the other hand satisfying, since whatever feelings you develop for the various characters--as they flit across the screen, some of them never to return--are genuine, not ones you've been led to by the nose. Ry herself isn't particularly likable, but she is hardworking and stubborn. Malcolm McDowell as the company's director (based on the Joffrey's real director) is over the top, nearly a stereotype, but one with unexpected breath in him, both autocratic and feeling, all-seeing and oblivious. Altman lets the details of being be, without exploring them to death, so that in among the usual tales of dance (the injury that ends a career, the meddling manager) there is something that corresponds to a real and precise reality.

Altman makes use of a pervasive mood of anxiety so that our feeling that something is about to happen grows. McDowell's director has his accountant always hovering in the background, waiting to deliver some bad news; dancers in rehearsals are always shadowed by other dancers, by the possibility of replacement, one's own expendability and fragility literally embodied. And when something does happen, it happens so quietly you hardly notice it, and then it is pushed offstage and replaced by something else. A devastating moment, absorbed by the ongoing movement of life. EMILY HALL

The Statement

dir. Norman Jewison

Opens Fri Jan 16.
The Statement is a thriller concerning an ultra-right-wing Frenchman (Michael Caine) who, during WWII, assisted the Nazis in locating and executing Jews, and now, in the early '90s, is an old man running from the law. Sadly, however, with the exception of Caine's performance, there is little to recommend in the film. For one, there is no real mystery or suspense in The Statement. From the start, we know who the bad guy is, and it is only a matter of time before he is gunned down for his crimes. All we are watching, then, is the net of the conspirators--who turn out to be members of the Catholic Church--closing in on their man. Another problem is the film is set in France, involves French characters, and was entirely shot in France, and yet all of the actors are British, who maintain their upper- to lower-class British accents. This makes the movie world unbelievable and rather clunky. But even if Jewison had shot the film in French, the result would probably have been the same: an uninspired piece of social criticism. CHARLES MUDEDE