Since some of you have been asking via e-mail about my reaction, I wrote a somewhat-proper capsule review:

"In the manner of semi-documentaries such as Abbas Kiarostami’s Close-Up and Anna Deavere Smith’s one-woman show Twilight: Los Angeles, Robert Altman’s The Company is a fictional film so intertwined with the truths that inspired it that libraries will dread determining whether to label the DVD with the 'NF' sticker or the 'F.' Theoretically a imaginary year in the life of Chicago’s Joffrey Ballet, nearly all the events in the film are faithful reproductions of incidents over the Ballet’s last decade; further, all the Joffrey performers in The Company (other than star Neve Campbell) are played by actual Joffrey performers, and all but one of the several ballets shown during the film are part of the Joffrey’s repertoire. Further adding to the perceived veracity, Altman threw out nearly all the dialogue in Barbara Turner’s (Pollack) screenplay, requesting instead for the (mostly) non-professional actors to use Turner’s outline but improvise their own conversation. It’s an interesting conceptual experiment, and there is some of the upstairs/downstairs subtext that threatened to overwhelm Altman’s Gosford Park (in The Company, it’s both management v. performers and established performers v. inexperienced performers). But The Company is ultimately a slim work: There’s no forward motion in either plot or characterization -- discounting costumes, there’s virtually no scene in the film’s final third that couldn’t have been within the first third -- and Altman’s archetypal outsized cast is a detriment for a film that, other than the Joffrey’s performances, runs scarcely an hour. Always agreeable, but little more."

Dale

Your last few lines there actually capture the feeling I get every time I go to an actual performance of the Joffrey Ballet. Sounds like he did manage to catch them in the act.

And here's Movieguide's summation:
[quote]It is a disjointed, aimless, post-modern, deconstructionist, pro-Hindu, ensemble piece with very few interesting traits, even for those who like ballet.[/quote]

8O

Even after reading MDP above I was disappointed. Here was a film without passion. There is no passion visible in the dancers as they train and practice. There is no passion in what bit of love story there is. Maybe that was by design to have nothing to distract from the dance performances. But a documentary or a PBS Great Performances would have done that better.