Casey Affleck’s Company Is the Most Frustrating Film at Venice

Casey Affleck’s third directorial outing, Company, begins and ends with an evocation of the Sufi poet Rumi’s “The Guest House,” attributed in the film simply to “a Persian mystic.” The poem declares, “This being human is a guest house. / Every morning a new arrival,” and then explains that every feeling — “a joy, a depression, a meanness” — is to be welcomed as an honorable guest, there to expand our understanding and experience of life. It’s a beautiful notion and one the film only partly manages to capture with its nesting-doll structure of spare stories. Company is a moody, atmospheric affair, but its philosophy of openness to life is betrayed by its dour, closed-off sensibility.

The film begins in the 1970s with the arrival of a mysterious woman, Evelyn (Emily Alyn Lind), at a crowded Christmas party, where she begins to tell a story about the arrival of another mysterious woman, Alice (Caylee Cowan), at a remote cabin in 1953. That cabin’s sole resident is a sad, elderly hermit, Tom (Nick Nolte), who lost his wife in childbirth and has spent many years wondering if the daughter he gave up decades ago might one day make her way back home. Alice too starts telling Tom a story — this one about her grandmother, Rebecca (Adelaide Clemens), who one day in 1903 found a mysterious young man, Caleb (Atticus Affleck, the director’s son), shivering outside her Colorado farmhouse and brought him in to live with her and her husband, Emmett (Scoot McNairy). 

Naturally, the stories will reflect and comment on one another, and Affleck cuts among the three in intriguing ways. In fact, there are more tales beyond those; Caleb, Rebecca, and Emmett all have backstories we glimpse to varying degrees. The fresh-faced Caleb has clearly seen more than his youthful features suggest. (It must be noted that young Atticus Affleck looks a lot like Casey Affleck himself and also quite a bit like Timothée Chalamet, who of course once played young Casey Affleck in Interstellar.) He and Rebecca have an interesting ongoing philosophical argument about looking on the bright side versus stewing in resentment and seeking revenge. This eventually feeds into a third-act revelation I won’t give away, though Casey Affleck’s somber direction doesn’t really treat it like a twist, especially given the way some of it is telegraphed early on.

Interestingly, these turns don’t add any particular resonance to Company, which often feels like a meaning in search of a story. Fairly early on, we may notice the film’s central narrative is that of Rebecca and Caleb — the other strands come off more like structural flights of fancy at best and filler at worst — and it’s a fairly thin one. It feels at times as if Company started off as something more ambitious and sprawling in which we would learn more about these people and maybe become invested in their lives and their respective pasts. But the finished picture, at 95 minutes, ultimately doesn’t offer enough to justify all that narrative dithering. It feels as if it’s been clipped into a curt, cold series of fables, none of which gives us any sense of the world and its many wonders and possibilities, however many Rumi quotes one may tack on.

Maybe the idea is to suggest without necessarily showing. Because what Company does have is a deep sense of place and an austere, luminous beauty. Majestic forests as far as the eye can see. Snow-covered hills haloed with reflected light. A remote cabin decaying across the years. Distant memories shot in a dreamy haze. (There are eight credited cinematographers, which I assume was purposeful and not the result of production chaos.) Affleck has a feel for composition, and the evocative imagery at times hints at something the narrative fails to. Even so, it’s not quite enough. A movie that tells us to embrace sadness and meanness as well as joy and wonder should at least have some joy and wonder in it, not just sadness and meanness.

Affleck is clearly trying for something closer to poetry here, hoping the film’s visual splendor and its heightened dialogue would convey profundity. The screenplay was co-written by Ron Hansen (a great novelist who wrote The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, the film adaptation of which gave Affleck one of his greatest roles), and it’s full of Hansen-esque lines like “Let the burning deepen your capacity for love, like the flame that hollows the wood into a bowl” and “This whole world’s a whirly-wind. You can never really see what’s coming” and “I know what’s in store for me. I didn’t have the cards this hand … I’m gonna plant some seeds in the ground for a few years, until I’ve planted myself.” They’re good lines, but a little of this stuff goes a long way and too much of it goes nowhere at all. And with so little to latch on to in the way of character, incident, or feeling, we find ourselves mostly unmoved. Beautiful and inert, Company may be the most frustrating film I’ve seen at Venice this year.

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