COMPANY, THE - DVD review

I love spy novels. So why did I not love this TNT mini-series, repackaged now on DVD and Blu-ray? It even has the slow-simmering feel of a potboiler: the meandering first half that lays the narrative groundwork, followed by a second half that gets a sudden jump-start with action and wants to careen toward the finish line.

Ahhh, that's why. Novels are intended for one reader who's already bought the book, and so what is there to lose if the first five chapters are slower to produce anything palatable than a clogged coffeemaker? You bought it, so you keep reading. But a TV mini-series? For every person who loved this show, there's got to be five or six who turned to other programming after a plodding first episode.

For a three-part series that purports to pull back the curtain and give us behind-the-scenes insight into the early years of the CIA (Central Intelligence Agency) and KGB (Committee for State Security) through the experiences of operatives we assume to be typical, and for a series that spans 40 years and therefore implies a broader scope that would help us understand more about how those rival agencies operated in a world rendered suddenly bi-polar by the Second World War, "The Company" has a surprisingly parochial feel to it. I've not read the novel by Robert Littell that spawned the series, so I can't say where the fault lies. All I can say is that this 286-minute film about spies and espionage is gruelingly slow and tediously ordinary for the first several hours, and then things pick up so quickly in sections it's like the student asleep in class whose whole body suddenly convulses into consciousness . . . then lapses back into sleep again.

The first third of this mini-series seems to want it both ways. With an audience of men already guaranteed by the spy-stuff, it's as if some brainiac thought, Hey, let's focus on romance so we can appeal to the women as well! So in this film about double agents and double crosses we also get a double-doze (oops, I mean dose) of slow-to-develop relationships between a Yale golden boy (Chris O'Donnell) who was recruited to join the CIA and a German ballerina (Alexandra Maria Lara) who's providing them with information, and between an Russian-national classmate of Jack's (Rory Cochrane) who's recruited by the KGB to be a mole and a Jewish girl (Erika Marozsan) he meets who's writing a book about Stalin's persecution of the Jews. Not to be left out, the third Yale classmate (Alessandro Nivola) ends up marrying the daughter (Kristin Booth) of a man who works in the Truman White House, though there's not nearly the time spent on this relationship than there is on the others.

It almost seems that more time and care has been spent on the romantic angles than on the intrigues at hand, and it tends to really slow the narrative--not just by its pacing, but also because it fractures things so. Everything is so oblique that it's hard to keep things straight. I'm guessing the average lover of spy-thrillers will wish there were more scenes and time spent with a boozy CIA operative whose code name is Sorcerer (Alfred Molina) and the tight-assed bureaucratic specialist code-named Mother (Michael Keaton) he butts heads with. Molina does a decent job in his role, though it's hard to watch Keaton and not think of the similar way that Kevin Costner looked in "JFK." Keaton injects so many twitches and mannerisms into his character, you'd think he had hooked up to a car battery. Even so, he's more interesting than O'Donnell's character.

Yes, things pick up when Jack is sent to Hungary and Budapest falls, and the action picks up again when he's sent to Cuba just before the failed Bay of Pigs invasion, and yes, the saga gets more visually stimulating during moments like that. But such heightened bursts of narrative energy just aren't frequent enough. I suspect that much may have been lost in translation, since Littell's novel ran 892 pages. By the time this is over, I didn't get the sweeping sense of history that I suspect one may have gotten from the book. Though this series begins in 1954 Berlin when the city was still freshly divided and ends with Jack's recommendation that the U.S. support a Boris Yeltsin presidency, "The Company" as a film feels much smaller to me. It's well acted, but I wish it were also well-conceived. Around midpoint things really pick up, but everything seems so hurried compared to the leisurely-paced first third. I'm giving this a 6, based on those portions that are successful.

Video:
"The Company" is mastered in High Definition and presented in 1.78:1 anamorphic widescreen. Some of the scenes have more grain than others, but for the most part it's a decent picture.

Audio:
The soundtrack is an English Dolby Digital 5.1 that's largely average until you hit scenes where the tanks rumble, and then you realize that it's slightly above-average. There's a nice balance between treble and bass, and good use of the effects speakers at such moments. But because much of the film is stand-and-talk dialogue, you sometimes don't notice. Subtitle options are English (CC) and French.

Extras:
Two special features are included, one a short feature on the novel and how it came to television, and the other a production-style "making of" featurette that gives the usual blend of talking heads and clips. If you have a DVD-ROM drive that's compatible (sorry, Mac owners), you can also access a "Covert Mission" bonus feature. I don't have a PC, so I can't comment.

Bottom Line:
There will be people out there who appreciate this series more than I have, but I suspect they will be the ones who are already familiar with Robert Littell's novel, so that they have knowledge of what's beneath the tip of this iceberg that writer Ken Nolan and director Mikael Salomon have given us.

It may be a simple math problem. Admittedly, the Golden Age of TV mini-series has passed, but it's astounding to consider that Littell's nearly 900-page novel was translated into 4.5 screen hours, while Herman Wouk's sprawling "Winds of War" and "War and Remembrance," which spanned roughly 2000 pages, were given 30 hours on television back in the '80s. That's a huge difference, and it begs two questions: Are today's TV producers thinking that Americans' attention-spans can't tolerate long mini-series anymore? If so, can a successful adaptation be made with such extreme compression? My guess is, probably not. This one seems under adapted from the novel.