Although Robert Altman's reputation seems to rest at least partly on his innovations with the art of overlapping dialogue, he is also a silent storyteller of enormous grace and invention. When I think of my favorite moments in his films, I think of images, not sounds: the exchange of looks between John McCabe and Mrs. Miller over their first meeting in McCabe & Mrs. Miller; Roger Wade's suicide-by-sea in The Long Goodbye; the dreamlike ambiguity of the final pan in 3 Women; Van Gogh painting in a field of sunflowers in Vincent and Theo; and on and on. These moments needn't be silent for them to register most profoundly on a visual level; the scene from McCabe & Mrs. Miller, for instance, is full of background noise. But it never overwhelms the beauty of Altman's close-ups and direction of his actors' facial expressions; the background noise functions as context or punctuation marks.

The Company, released in late 2003, has Altman coming closer to a silent film than he ever has before. Taking inspiration from his film's subject--the world of ballet--he has stripped the film of dialogue to a remarkable degree. The classic Altman background noise is still present, of course, but never has it been less relevant to the visuals. Interspersed with the film's chronicling of one season in the life of The Joffrey Ballet is the story of the romance between a dancer in the company, Ry (Neve Campbell), and a young chef named Josh (James Franco). Altman says on the commentary track featured on the DVD of The Company that he thought of their scenes together as an ongoing "pas de deux." This radical approach not only ties the two story strands together, making Ry and Josh's somewhat schematic scenes appear organic to the total vision of the film, but also allows the director to indulge in some awe-inspiring nonverbal mise-en-scene.

An example:

The scene is a bar somewhere in Chicago. Altman opens with a wide shot. The bar itself is located on screen left in the background of the frame; a pool table hovers in the center of the frame in foreground. Ry is sitting at the bar. Josh walks in. He stands beside her and orders a Sam Adams. Ry immediately gets up and walks towards the pool table. The camera then moves from its formerly stationary position, tracking along with Ry as she walks past the table. Altman then cuts to a closer shot of Josh as he turns and watches Ry. We see her grab a pool cue. Josh walks into a phone booth just behind the pool table. Before picking up the phone, he stares for a long moment at Ry, who is seen out of focus in the foreground of the shot. Altman then alternates several point-of-view shots of Ry shooting pool as Josh looks on; the phone is to his ear but he is obviously saying nothing. Eventually Altman returns to the wide shot he began with. Ry is now in the foreground of the frame, lining up shots, apparently oblivious to Josh as he exits the phone booth and returns to a barstool in the background. After a while, Ry and Josh's eyes finally meet; they exchange glances in alternating close and wide shots. A variation on "My Funny Valentine"--a kind of theme song throughout The Company--is heard on the soundtrack. It is only as the scene ends, perhaps, that we come to realize that this courtship has unfolded without so much as a single word of dialogue. Altman's choreography (and that truly is the word for it, as Malcolm McDowell points out in an interview on the DVD) of his characters is nothing short of extraordinary, as Ry and Franco move through this space, bounce off each other, and finally come together.

Earlier in the film, there's another silent (except for the music) scene to go in the Altman pantheon: the director cuts between Ry coming home to her tiny apartment, unwinding and relaxing, with a fellow Joffrey dancer, Alec (Davis Robertson) rehearsing in the studio. Whatever connections Altman intended for us to glean in the juxtaposition of these images is left for the viewer to decide; on the face of it, they are simply two moments in the lives of two dancers. Altman, as always, is more interested in presenting the small details of a world than he is in plot.

The ballets themselves are photographed just about as well, often with startling splashes of color and a great intuition about how to capture movement on stage. We're reminded of Altman's recent interest in setting films against the backdrop of dramatic weather events during one particular ballet (we recall that a hurricane is approaching all throughout the course of The Gingerbread Man; Dr. T & the Women ends with a Wizard of Oz-like tornado.) Set outdoors during the evening, it begins to storm midway through the performance; wind, thunder, lightening, and rain frame the dancers and-because Altman is a great filmmaker who is attuned to such things--amplify the emotion being projected on stage.

During one of these astonishing sequences, it occurred to me that not only is The Company almost unquestionably the finest American film of 2003, but that it may very likely be one of the peaks of Robert Altman's magnificent career. At 79, Altman's art continues to grow, to offer us new challenges and to continually distort our sense of where this master director's gifts end. There's no limit to what he can do.

                                                                  © THE FILM JOURNAL 2004