Altman's 'Company' devoid of character

A fascinating trend I have come to observe in great, or at least interesting, films is that they will often divide their critics on shared conclusions: the reason they hate the film is the exact same reason that they love the film. Robert Altman could probably be the poster septuagenarian for this theory. \nConsidered by some to be one of America's greatest living directors and by others to be little less than a pretentious hack, either their love or hate of the man is typically unified and focused toward one element: Altman's predictably unconventional method of direction. His latest foray into forcing the fringes of cinema to its, at times, bearable edges, "The Company" is a signature Altman film that seems to ultimately suffer directly because of this.\nAltman's film revolves around the Joffrey Ballet of Chicago, one of the most respected dance companies in the world. Conventional wisdom of the celluloid world alone could already warn of the oozing sentimentality and melodrama that would be easily exploited within the world of a dance company. Altman is anything but conventional, and with sheers honed on the silver screen over five decades of work, he expertly trims these extraneous elements out of the film. However, the hand that holds the scissors seems to have gotten a little trim happy and Altman has nearly sliced the very soul out of his own picture. \nUsing the Altman trademarks of an ensemble cast, the overlapping dialogue, crucial moments of character development captured by wondering zooms, Altman's use of the subtle to create moments that exist in the now has spread anything left of the already minimalist story so thinly that its center, ballet as a performance, becomes a vacuum, the characters' seemingly hollow shells connected to nothingness.\n"The Company" has been Neve Campbell's labor of love for many years, and it is shown by her involvement in the film as writer, co-producer and star. Campbell, herself, was a dancer with the National Ballet of Canada before becoming an actress. Campbell can, in most cases, hold her own next to the professional dancers of Joffrey, and strictly from a visual standpoint, Altman captures some truly sublime moments of overwhelming grace and beauty with the performances. Nonetheless, these performances become isolated elements, detached from the very ones who are creating them because our sense of character has been left to little more than a few scattered loose ends. "The Company" had the raw potential to be a powerfully moving film, but that potential seems to have been left on the cutting room floor.