Words by JANE CROWTHER
The ‘company’ of the title of Casey Affleck’s latest written-directed film is the people we sit with, socialise with, invite into our homes. That last bit is key and a giveaway to the plot twist that comes a little too late in this slow-burn, handsomely-mounted, era-hopping Russian doll movie. It begins with a young woman (Emily Alyn Lind) dressed out of style arriving at a Christmas party in the ’70s. Though not known to the host, she’s charitably ushered into the house and begins to hold court telling a story of Tom, an elderly man who died in the company of a stranger in a remote cabin in 1953. Tom (Nick Nolte doing grizzled) discovers a young woman (Caylee Cowan) in the snow and brings her into his humble abode where she begins to tell him a story too. In that tale, a turn-of-the-century homesteading couple (Scoot McNairy and Adelaide Clemens) find a young man in the snow (Atticus Affleck), and drag him in front of their hearth to recover.
Now, as the stories within stories progress, we look for the common theme. Is it in the otherworldliness of these visitors? Each dresses in black, talks in an olde worlde narrative and seem to have an insolence and poise beyond their years. Is it in the sense of approaching dread as the homesteaders deal with a plague of local murders where hearts are cut from bodies, Tom contemplates his mortality or, in the ’70s, a young man (Indiana Affleck) glowers darkly at the storyteller from across the room? What is the sting in the tale?
To reveal it would be to spoil, but Affleck (co-writing with Ron Hansen) lays clues as characters talk in gothic philosophical terms and move through the painterly vistas. In its use of voiceover and sketching the slow lives of American settlers – and the way that they leave their mark on the world – Company recalls something of Train Dreams. But where Clint Bentley’s film revelled in the simple man and word, Affleck’s narrators get tangled in oblique pondering and references to Persian mystics. It’s difficult to know what anyone is actually trying to say, despite them saying a lot.
The film is a showcase of Affleck’s skill as a director and his family though. Atticus Affleck makes an impression as a mini-me of his dad and pretender to the Chalamet school of precocious, magnetic performance. Affleck senior’s late mother also appears as one of the party guests in the first segment. Meanwhile Nolte and Ben Mendelsohn (as a suspicious Aussie neighbour to the homesteaders) provide a sense of groundedness which keeps the endeavour from floating away on florid ideas of death, life and the meaning of it all. As a genre period piece with an unexpected bite, it’s good looking and stately-paced. But there is a recent existing film (no spoilers) that addresses similar themes to which it will be unfavourable compared.
Words by JANE CROWTHER
Images courtesy of IMAGE NATION STUDIOS/SPOOKY PICTURES
Company premiered at the 83rd Venice Film Festival