She came to dance

here's a classic episode of "The Mary Tyler Moore Show" in which '70s everyfeminist Mary Richards wistfully recalls her childhood dreams of becoming a ballerina. Near the end, she reaches into a trunk and excitedly pulls out a pair of faded toe shoes to stand en pointe in her Minneapolis living room. Yeeeezhe! she winces after the merest of moments on her feet, shaking her head as she shrinks from the pain.

Back go the slippers into storage.

The point being: It's easy to romanticize from a distance, but once a ballet career ends, there are many good reasons why it usually ends forever. And yet not one of these practical considerations managed to stop Neve Campbell from making "The Company."

For those who missed the bubblegum output of the 1990s, Campbell (first name pronounced "Nev" as in never, honoring the Dutch maiden name of her mom) is the likable actress made famous by TV's "Party of Five" and the big-screen horror franchise "Scream." Part of a stage-

minded Canadian family (dad's a drama teacher, mom once owned a dinner theater, older brother Christian is an actor), she trained with the National School of Ballet in Ontario from age 9 until she burned out on all the discipline and competitiveness in her early teens. Though she adores ballet enough to have kept a casual foot in it whenever gaps in moviemaking allow, she hasn't danced professionally in more than a decade. Still, she's never let go of the desire to develop and star in a fictional film about real experiences in leotards. Enter "The Company," Campbell's idea of a faux documentary about life in the Joffrey Ballet of Chicago.

Many films are called labors of love, but this one was surely more laborious than most. To play the kind of up-and-coming prima ballerina she once aspired to be in real life, Campbell had to return full time to the grueling world of endless practice and constant hurt, and her reentry wasn't very different than that of the fictional Richards.

"That's pretty much how it felt," the actress confirms in a stuffy Boston hotel suite made even stuffier by the cigarettes she's been trying to kick since Ballet 101. "Ballet is really hard on the body, really challenging. And I am older, so I went through a lot."

Indeed. She's all of 30 now, practically ancient by both dance standards and the clock that hovers over performers who begin as teen idols. In the course of training almost nine hours a day for nearly half a year to get in shape for "The Company," Campbell says that all her old ballet-related injuries returned, necessitating daily visits to physiotherapists, chiropractors, osteopaths, and masseuses. Then she broke a rib doing a lift with her coach just before shooting began in Chicago, so she had to do the entire film gritting her teeth and compensating wherever the camera didn't notice.

"It was a lot of pain pills and focus," she acknowledges. But it's clear that she wouldn't have traded the experience for anything.

"The Company" is Campbell's brainchild and business proposition (she's its creator/producer as well as star), and it is designed to represent dance as she has not seen it on film before: from the inside out, with no imposition of a story to corral its many moving parts. Every scripted thing that happens on camera is rooted in a real-life vignette learned while Campbell and screenwriter Barbara Turner spent roughly four years interviewing and observing the Joffrey troupe in Chicago. The rest is improvised dialogue of the sort that the film's director, Robert Altman, has made his signature. In fact, you could say that "The Company" is to "The Turning Point" roughly as Altman's "Pret-a-Porter" is to "Mahogany": a brave attempt to go beyond histrionics and hair extensions.

There is no plot, no dramatic conflict, no real point or conclusion to "The Company." When not onstage, the dancers smoke, complain, sleep around, and obsess. Campbell's character does have a fling with a handsome chef (James Franco), but you'll be disappointed if you expect the relationship to take on visible layers.

"There's no story in there that you don't already know anyway," says Altman by phone from his New York production studio. "They meet, they [have sex], they fall in love, they blah blah blah, they get injured, and probably a week after the ending of our movie, they're not together anymore. . . . I didn't want it to look like a movie; I wanted it to look like a dance."

In other words, he demands that viewers apply their imaginations to this pas de deux, even if filling in the blanks is not something American moviegoers are historically attracted to or particularly good at. And if some audiences feel cheated by the abstract picture that emerges from all these unconnected dots?

"Ya got me, kid," he answers with the audible shrug of a 78-year-old director unhampered by commercial concerns. "That's the viewer's problem, not mine."

Campbell couldn't have found a director more sympathetic to her vision of the project, which had stalled when, she says, she found most studios "were happy to have Neve Campbell in a movie that happened to be about dance, and I wanted to do a movie about dance that happened to have Neve Campbell in it."

Campbell ultimately hired screenwriter Turner ("Georgia"), who facilitated talks with her friend Altman about directing the plainly Altman-esque project. Though Campbell says she'd always considered him the "best director on this planet" when it came to creating worlds instead of characters, he had to be persuaded that ballet was a universe he belonged in, and he rejected her entreaties several times before deciding that it might be time in his career to work without benefit of a ready opinion.

"I call it looking under rocks," says the colorful filmmaker, whose way with the absurd ("Nashville," "Short Cuts") inspired raining frogs in Paul Thomas Anderson's "Magnolia." "You turn a rock over and there's some maggots there and a couple of worms and maybe a dead flower . . . or maybe a live flower. That was my approach to `The Company.' "

Maggots. Well of course; that's just what ballet films have been missing all these years. Thankfully, Altman isn't describing his approach to staged ballets, which "The Company" presents about as lovingly and lushly as any dance fan could ask. Campbell, who like so many ballerinas was initially seduced by a childhood viewing of "The Nutcracker," remembers also being a fan of the fairy-tale stories presented in films such as "The Red Shoes" (1948) and anything starring Gene Kelly or Fred Astaire. But she's frustrated that she can't point to a previous fictionalized account that's illustrative of the daily life and sacrifices ballet dancers sign up for, or that baldly exposes the contradictions inherent in a profession built on making the most rigorous and painful movements seem effortless and elegant. So that is the overarching purpose of "The Company": to educate viewers in an honest way that the makers of "Billy Elliot" never even considered.

Meanwhile, for Campbell the movie fills a more personal void.

"What I didn't expect from doing this film was a sense of relief," the actress confesses. "There was such a sadness about the loss of dance in my life. I never thought I would go beyond that; most dancers can't. I feel lucky to have made this film because it's allowed me to let go of any pain I had, any lingering questions about why I put myself through all of that training, discipline, and frustration."

Honestly though, no one would have blamed her if she'd bowed out at Yeeeezhe!

Janice Page can be reached at jpage22@hotmail.com.