“I don’t know why I’d care about made-up places and made-up people,” Caleb (Atticus Affleck) says of his one and only time watching Shakespeare in “Company,” imagining that the experiences he’s had even as just a teen have been more interesting. If it’s possible to lie and tell the truth at the same time, he may be mixing the two when he’s clearly a fan of fanciful tales that he authors himself as he introduces himself to Rebecca (Adelaide Clemens) and Emmett (Scoot McNairy), the couple that’s taken him in during a harsh winter in the Midwest circa 1903. He’ll only admit later that the first thing he told them, about heading west to help his uncle with a sorghum harvest, was actually a fib, but the things he insists are true sound far more preposterous, whether it was spending time in Argentina as a cowboy or becoming a stowaway on a ship to London to make his way to the U.S., his relative youth betraying him as much as the travel that would be involved at the time. Even if they become skeptical of Caleb, Rebecca and Emmett’s open-hearted humanity leads them to keep him around, as well as another natural inclination in just wanting to hear a good story when out in the middle of nowhere, a narrative can be as useful to keep warm as a fireplace and while one Affleck is shown earning his keep by spinning a good yarn, his father Casey delivers a strong one himself, considering how much people can get caught up in them to the denial of everything else.
Partnering on the screenplay with Ron Hansen, the author of “The Assassination of Jesse James By the Coward of Robert Ford,” Affleck is interested in exploring frontiers of all kinds with an unusual, beguiling drama that ambitiously tests how much its audience will accept as its lead character does when the story is too good to put down. In one of the best uses of a Bob Dylan song in recent memory to open the film, the director sets up a 1975 frame and a questionable adherence to the truth that runs throughout as “Shelter From the Storm” accompanies a young woman named Evelyn (Emily Alyn Lind) to a party she’s not invited to, but welcomed in when she’s told she has the wrong address and the host can’t help but ask her inside when it’s raining. Small talk with other guests quickly turns towards entertaining them with what Evelyn promises is the most interesting story she has to offer, recalling hearing of a brokenhearted widow (Nick Nolte) who also invited a young woman named Alice (Caylee Cowan) in from the cold in 1953, who in turn tells him the story of Rebecca, Emmett and Caleb. Notably, both Caleb and Alice don’t knock on the door, but rather hauled in by the homeowners who find them outside too beleaguered to reach their destination.
Once they’re let in, as much into the minds of their hosts as their living rooms, Alice, Evelyn and Caleb all captivate with the stories they tell, true to the film’s title, providing some much needed company in isolated times. But as a central story starts to take precedence over the others in concern growing around Caleb, who can appear finicky beyond the reasons of your typical teen, the justification for allowing him to stay increasingly appears more emotional than practical and he starts to appear to poses a real danger, at first brought in to protect the family from a rash of killings that have traveled as gossip to being suspected of the murders himself. Having a preternatural poise to go along his mother Summer Phoenix’s piercing eyes and his father’s gangly posture, Atticus Affleck is pretty irresistible at the center of the film despite looking more and more like trouble and while the young man seems to push credulity to its limits when he could be obscuring a true identity, “Company” follows suit with an unpredictable third act full of crazy reveals that it may be a struggle to entirely make sense of as it’s unfolding, yet the fact it remains engaging against anyone’s better judgment cleverly becomes a part of its point.
“Company” reflects the interests that led the director as an actor to star in “Jesse James,” with the enchanting curly Q dialogue of the wild west, as well as his collaborations with David Lowery, where a sense of fantasy would appear to be lurking under a hard reality, but also how those experiences emboldened him to really go for it with a film where the five credited cinematographers speak to shooting across four seasons for Caleb’s section and the three parallel storylines about storytelling really interrogate the practice and its potential to be a balm or delusion depending on how it’s deployed. None of it would work without a convincing ensemble with Clemens a particular standout as the one whose tentative trust of Caleb is the film’s core thread, and as each scene is dense with tension over how much should be believed and why, it is quite a persuasive and gripping piece of entertainment.
“Company” will screen again at the Venice Film Festival on September 8th at 8:30 pm at the PalaBiennale.