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The Company

The Company is the genre-bending story about the inner workings of the Chicago Joffrey Ballet company and its young up-and-coming dancers. Interlaced with beautiful dancing footage, including a dazzling performance of Neve Campbell's character during a thunderstorm, the movie follows the emotional ups and downs of the dancers' lives, such as break-ups and interfering parents. As the company works toward performing a new ballet, the character of Rye (Neve Campbell) deals with the recent break-up with her boyfriend and her new flame.

Neve Campbell does little actual acting in this movie, but when she does, she does with much more subtlety and grace than what we've seen of her do in Party of Five and the Scream trilogy, where her too-intense style was a little hard to believe.

As beautiful as the dancing scenes are in this movie, it can't seem to decide whether or not it wants to have a concrete plot or not, and wanders aimlessly. The ending trails off weakly with a bland "life goes on" feeling. Mixing the beauty of ballet with the drama of life is a premise with much potential, but The Company doesn't handle it very well at all. Instead of the drama of life, the movie offers little more than small slices of it, such as scenes in which Rye picks up a guy at a bar and ushers her over-enthusiastic mother out of her apartment. While all the "life" scenes in the movie are very realistic to the point of being documentary-esque, there is no real point to them, and the viewer will be left asking what The Company has that an actual ballet documentary doesn't have.

The Company will appeal to a very limited audience. There isn't enough drama for it to be considered drama, and there isn't enough ballet for it to be considered a ballet. Ballet-lovers will be disappointed by the annoying interruption of Rye and her new boyfriend making breakfast in the morning, and movie-lovers will be disappointed by the lack of plot direction and character development. The Company tries to do something new, and certainly means well, but amounts to little more than a fictional ballet documentary with a young, attractive actress (whose ballet-double probably spends more time on the screen than she does)thrown into the mix.

Written by: Savannah Bobo

Reviewers Rating: 5
Reader's Rating: 5.50
Reader's Votes: 2

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