An 'Impossible' Mission Full Of Fun And Wonder.

DAVE DAVIES, HOST:

This is FRESH AIR. I'm Dave Davies, in for Terry Gross. This is the time of year when many of us will get to a performance of "The Nutcracker," but you don't have to be interested in ballet to be fascinated by the book "Apollo's Angels: A History of Ballet" by our guest Jennifer Homans. It's now out in paperback. Homans' story of how ballet evolved from the 16th century is rich with history about class structure, gender, costume, shifting images of the ideal body and ideas about what the body is physically capable of.

Jennifer Homans used to a professional ballet dancer. She performed with the Chicago Lyric Opera Ballet, the San Francisco Ballet and Pacific Northwest Ballet. She's dance critic for The New Republic and teaches the history of dance at NYU, where she is a distinguished scholar in residence. Terry spoke to Homans last year, when "Apollo's Angels" was released in hardback.

TERRY GROSS, HOST:

Jennifer Homans, welcome to FRESH AIR. Let me start with something I found very interesting. You write: Ballet is sexual, but dancers infrequently experience their art as sexual, even when their limbs are wrapped around each other or they are joined in an impassioned embrace. And I will add to that that some of the lifts in ballet require some pretty intimate touching. So why isn't dance experienced as sexual?

JENNIFER HOMANS: Well, I think it depends on who you're talking about. The dancers themselves I don't think experience the art as sexual, and the reason for that is really that it's work. And when you're in a state of high concentration over, you know, are you on the music, is the step being done properly, what is the feeling behind it, even if it's a sexually sort of loaded scene, it's not sexual between the two people who are dancing.

Whether it's sexual or not for the people watching it is another story all together.

GROSS: So during, like, say a lift that's so beautiful and graceful and maybe even sexual to the audience, is the dancer ever thinking, were you ever thinking when you were a dancer: Is he going to drop me?

HOMANS: Well, you know, I never was thinking that because within the flow of the movement, you have complete confidence, hopefully, in the partner that you're working with. And so, you know, those kinds of considerations are not to the fore.

Now, if you're working with somebody you don't quite trust, or there's a lift that's particularly difficult, you know, then I think there can be a certain tension. And that's something you want to try to get rid of in a performance, I think.

One of the great ballerinas once told me: When you start to have a dialogue in your head when you're performing, that's when you know it's going wrong. In a way, you want to get rid of those words and sort of enter a kind of different way of existing for the time that you're on stage. So instead of thinking about...

GROSS: A way of thinking about your music and movement?

HOMANS: That's right. You know, so instead of thinking about what you're going to have for dinner that night, which you could do because dancers know their steps so well, and they are so second nature that your mind can wander. But, you know, to sort of shift into another dimension, as it were, so that you're not thinking about that, but you're in a kind of close synchrony with music.

GROSS: Before we get into how the ideal image of the dancer's body has changed over the centuries, can you just describe what the ideal ballerina's body is considered today?

HOMANS: You know, that's a tough question, and people always ask that because there is the concept of ballet as something that strives towards perfection and towards a perfect body, that you must have, you know, long legs, turned-out hips, arched feet, preferably some people even say a small head.

But I think that's actually really a misunderstanding and a misconception. Dancers do come in all sizes and shapes. Yes, it helps if you have the facility that the technique requires, but the main quality that makes a great dancer is not the perfection of their body but really the luminosity of it.

It's a quality of illumination. You know it when you see it. You know, two dancers doing the same step, one might have a perfect body and perfect technique. The other one might be much less perfect but much more interesting to watch. So it's not straightforward, as it might seem.

GROSS: Nevertheless, if we compared a ballet dancer's body today with a ballet dancer of the 16th or 17th centuries, would we see a big difference?

HOMANS: Yes, we would. The dancers of the 16th and 17th century were, in the case of the women, more - well, they were just, they followed the aesthetic of their own time. And in a way, you could say we do, too. It's a sort of the far end of the extreme of our time, but there are those images of fashion and models and, you know, the ideal sort of elegant and graceful body.

And that's the, I think, the unifying theme throughout so that even the technique allowed you to modify your own perhaps imperfect proportions.

You know, if you're too tall, maybe you would lower your arms a bit so that you don't quite appear so high up. So you might bend them a little bit if they're too long. So you could sort of try to craft your own image.

And the other thing to remember about that is that the dancers in the very beginning, in the 17th century, it was the man, not the woman, who was the privileged performer. It was really a male ideal at the beginning, and it was only come the 1830s that women started to be the central focus of the dance tradition.

GROSS: We'll get back to that in a minute. But, you know, you write about how dance was originally a very aristocratic art. It was performed for kings, and that there was considered to be a connection between posture, nobility and character. So how did that sense of ballet being an aristocratic art affect what was expected of how the dancers looked and how they carried themselves?

HOMANS: You know, ballet began as a social art. It was a dance that was done by courtiers. It was done by kings and princes, not people in the street but aristocrats. So it was done at court by people in social situations. It was not a theatrical art set off from social life.

So, you know, the ways that people moved were - had to do with the ways that they moved in their lives. Like for example, if you have a reverence, a bow, which is still performed today in classical ballet, both in dances but also at the end of most dance classes, that's the same bow that you would see in a painting of courtiers leaving their king. And how far they bow, how deep they go was a sign of respect for the monarch or for the person they were addressing.

GROSS: So when you say ballet was performed by people, you know, in palaces and stuff, as opposed to in theaters, so - but they didn't learn all the kind of complicated steps that we know today.

HOMANS: Well, they did, actually.

GROSS: They did, really?

HOMANS: They did. You know, Louis XIV was himself a wonderful dancer. He worked very hard at his dance, especially in his earlier years. And he practiced on a daily basis and performed regularly in his own spectacles and productions.

So, you know, people did achieve a fairly high level of technique. And it was -a lot of time was spent on mastering these noble forms. And really the reason for that it was proof of your stature. So it was very important to be able to present yourself in these ways convincingly.

Now, the tradition really separates out, and you start to have a more difficult technique that even the most diligent aristocrats can't keep up with sort of by the end of the end of the 17th century. And then dances are becoming professionals, and that's when you have more and more separation between the aristocrats who are watching the dance, increasingly, and the people who are performing it.

And the dancers at that point are much more exclusively drawn from the lower orders of society, which is in itself an interesting thing when you think about it because they are learning, in a way, to become aristocrats. On stage, they appear as noblemen, even if they're, in society, emphatically not.

GROSS: So really, the dancers were drawn from the lower classes of society?

HOMANS: They often were, you know. Once you moved away from the kings who were performing, dancers were drawn from the lower orders of society. In Russia, for example, in the origins of ballet in Russia, the dancers were serfs.

They were serfs on estates, and their owners paid vast sums of money to have them trained in this European, West European dance form so that they could perform for their masters on a, you know, on a summer's evening in the estate. And in this area, especially with women, there was a very close line between dancing and prostitution and...

GROSS: Between ballet and prostitution?

HOMANS: Between ballet and - maybe I shouldn't say prostitution so much, but these landowners would sometimes ask their serfs to take off their clothes at the end of the performance or things like this, where, you know, the line between ballet and art and sex was very thin.

GROSS: If you're just joining us, my guest is Jennifer Homans. She's the author of the new book "Apollo's Angels: A History of Ballet." Let's take a short break here, and then we'll talk some more. This is FRESH AIR.

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GROSS: My guest is Jennifer Homans, and she's the author of the new book "Apollo's Angels: A History of Ballet." She teaches the history of dance at NYU and is the dance critic for The New Republic.

So the five positions of ballet were codified in the late 17th century by Pierre Beauchamp, who was a ballet master who became the king's dancing master in France and was later appointed head of the Royal Academy of Dance. So what are the five positions of ballet, and how did Beauchamp go about codifying them?

HOMANS: Well, the five positions of ballet are the same positions that any child would learn today: first, second, third, fourth, fifth positions, positions of the feet, in this case, in particular. And, you know, Louis XIV realized that if his art form, this great, noble art form, was going to be sort of disseminated throughout his realm and even to other European countries, he would have to learn a way to write it down.

And so he asked Beauchamp to find a way to write it down, and one of the things that Beauchamp did was to write down these positions. He did also invent a notation. But the positions themselves are the grammar of ballet, they're the ABCs, the building blocks of classical ballet. So this was a vitally important moment when they were actually codified and recorded.

What do they do? The positions of ballet are - if you think of first position, it's really a noble position. You stand, in this case the feet were not 180 degrees, they were more sort of 90 degrees. So you're standing at ease, with grace, with control, with a sense of symmetry and precision. This was the...

GROSS: So your heels are together, and your feet are 90 degrees apart?

HOMANS: That's right. That's right, and your arms are in a relaxed but gracious way to the side. So, you know, this is the position of the high nobility. And the first position is a kind of resting place, a stopping point, the tonic, as one would say in music, of ballet.

And the other positions simply map the directions of the body in the ways in which you might travel or move in an efficient and graceful way, without any jarring or awkward movements.

GROSS: So how did dancing en pointe, dancing on your toes, start?

HOMANS: That's one of the most interesting moments in the history of ballet because it's really a point at which popular traditions feed into a sort of high operatic, high balletic art.

Marie Taglioni is the ballerina that we most associate with the origins of pointe work. And she was working in Vienna, and in Vienna, she was working at the opera house, but a lot of Italian troupes were passing through. And these sort of Commedia dell'arte or acrobatic troupes often, you know, did tricks.

And one of the tricks that they did do was to climb up on their toes and parade around. And this kind of trick was then incorporated into classical ballet, most notably by Taglioni, and sort of given an elevated form so that instead of just stomping around en pointe, it became an image of the ethereal or somebody who can leave the ground or fly into the air, whose point of contact with the earth is only slight. So, you know, this is a kind of elevation towards the angels and God. And so a trick becomes a kind of high aspiration.

GROSS: There's an illustration in your book of Marie Taglioni en pointe, and you point out that her calf muscles are bulging. Would a ballerina today have those bulging calf muscles?

HOMANS: Ballerinas today have more calf muscles than you might realize and, you know...

GROSS: But would they be bulging, or are they shaped differently?

HOMANS: Not maybe bulging quite the way hers were. And one of the reasons for that is that the early toe shoes were not supported in the same way that the toe shoes are today, so that the technique and the demands on the legs were quite different.

Marie Taglioni's toe shoes actually still exist. There is a pair in the archives at the Paris Opera. And you can go there and hold them. And they're not new shoes, they're old shoes, which is quite important because you can see where she stood, where they're scuffed, how she danced and where she danced.

And the important thing there is that she danced just on the tips of her metatarsals, not quite on the full pointe, the way dancers do today, and that the shoes were soft, very soft like a soft ballet shoe, and darned around the edges, so that she had to support the full weight of her body on this metatarsal with no extra glue or, you know, hardened materials, which is what support dancers today.

So her calves were doing the lion's share of the work. And it's not just her calves. Her entire legs are very beefy. So she's - in spite of her ethereal, fleeting image, she was actually quite hefty as a physical type.

GROSS: So which toes are you on when you're on toe?

HOMANS: You're really on the first two. That's - the main weight is being carried on the first two toes. And that's because when you're standing en pointe, that's the axis straight up through your spine so that you actually have more strength if you're balanced towards those first two toes than if you're sort of edged more towards the pinky toe. If you were on the pinky toe, if you think about, you'd fall off pointe just because your ankle would bend the wrong way.

So dancers are trained to be mainly on those first two toes, maybe three depending on the foot.

GROSS: Now, it's very interesting to read how the role of men and women in ballet changed over the centuries. And yet, you say that early on in ballet - and I guess you're talking 17th century, late 16th century here - men were given to virtuosity while women were expected to exercise restraint. You say the relationship was chivalric. Am I saying that right?

HOMANS: Yep.

GROSS: With the man performing technical feats in honor of his demure lady. So why was it the man who was taking center stage and being, I guess doing more physical feats than the woman?

HOMANS: Well, I mean, this really goes back to the court origins that we were talking about earlier. I mean, these are the men who are thought to be the highest members of society. And they are the kings, they are the ones in control. And the women are meant to be sort of the same but less.

So the women perform, but they don't do the same kind of extravagant and intricate footwork that the men do. And you can think of it partly as costume, as well. The women, of course, are wearing very long, heavy skirts.

To actually get off the ground or beat your legs or weave intricate steps with your feet would be very difficult in those kinds of costumes, whereas the men have free legs, and you can see them. So all of this worked towards the man having the more prominent bravura role and the women being more demure.

GROSS: So how did ballerinas become stars?

HOMANS: Ballerinas became stars when men, when the male aristocratic dancer was really discredited. And this happened in France. France was the center of the ballet world at this point.

And when the French Revolution came, this was the key moment for women. What happened? Well, the hatred and bitter animosity towards the aristocracy during the French Revolution had direct consequences for ballet, which after all, was an aristocratic art.

And so, you know, the day before the storming of the Bastille, the people of Paris stormed the opera. Why should you have this aristocratic art? If you're going to take down the aristocracy, let's take down ballet too.

So the men who were performing this art gradually became less admired, and they started to become sort of more acrobatic and to pull more and more from popular forms. The technique changed. And by the, you know, 1830s, 1840s, men are reviled on stage. You know, they're thought to be a disgrace.

Well, what steps into the void? Marie Taglioni, other female dancers who take the ideals that had existed in the aristocratic art form and turned them into a feminine ideal of which they are the masters.

And so then you get this image of the ballerina on toe, in these more Romantic-era ballets of unrequited love and the romantic themes that carried ballet into the 19th century.

DAVIES: Jennifer Homans' book "Apollo's Angels: A History of Ballet" is now out in paperback. She'll be back in the second half of the show. I'm Dave Davies, and this is FRESH AIR.

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DAVIES: This is FRESH AIR. I'm Dave Davies in for Terry Gross. We're listening to Terry's interview recorded last year with Jennifer Homans. Her book, "Apollo's Angels: A History of Ballet," is now out in paperback. It's about how the art of ballet evolved, shifting ideas about gender and the ideal body, and about how kings, courts and revolutions have influenced the development of ballet. Ballet began in the course of French kings.

GROSS: You were talking about the aristocratic basis of ballet. But in the Cold War, period it was Russia that was considered to be the center of ballet. And the Bolshoi Ballet was revered around the world, and even when Russia was America's enemy, the Bolshoi was such a big deal in the United States. So how did Russia, when it was a communist country, reconcile ballet with its aristocratic origins?

HOMANS: Yeah, that's a fascinating moment because, you know, as you say, I mean you've got a court art that is very much associated with, you know, Nicholas II and, who after all, is the - has an affair with one of the dancers. And when the revolution comes, Lenin, actually, takes over this ballerina's house, ransacks it and uses it as his headquarters, as a kind of symbol that, you know, that the court is over and I'm in control. So you would think that ballet would have gone with the Imperial Court. But in fact, it becomes the, sort of centerpiece of cultural life in the Soviet state, or certainly a very important part.

But the other thing is that ballets really did change and they reworked them to the new socialist image. So you had a period where there were lots of what they call tractor ballets. These were ballets about workers with shiny tools remaking the socialist state.

On the other hand, you also had classical ballets, Petipa ballets that were redone. You know, some of the aristocratic etiquette was wiped out, so you didn't have the same kind of emphasis on pantomime and gracious manners, and instead you had more bravura variations, a kind of muscular quality added to these dances so that they would, in fact, reflect the image of the Soviet state.

And, you know, the other thing is that ballet is an art form where you don't need the language in order to appreciate it. So, you know, the Russian leaders, or the Soviet leaders, could take diplomats of all kinds to the ballet. They didn't need to understand Russian in order to be impressed. So the ballet became a place where foreign dignitaries would be entertained and shown the great cultural life of the Soviet Union. When the country finally opened up a little bit and the Bolshoi, as you said, toured to the West, they were an absolute sensation. I mean the lines around the block, the cries of wonder and amazement at this extraordinary art form and at the dancers who performed it was part of the Cold War political story.

GROSS: Now George Balanchine, the great choreographer, who came to the U.S. from Russia, you describe him as the jewel in the crown of 20th century dance. And you say Balanchine saw ballet as the philosophy of an approach to life.

Now you studied at the New York City Ballet, which was founded by Balanchine. What did that mean to you when you were studying?

HOMANS: Well, you know, I was a kid from Chicago and I, you know, had not grown up in a theatrical world. My father was an academic and my mother worked in the university, so I had very little exposure to theatrical people. And when I arrived in New York at Balanchine's school, there I was in this kind of little Russia. I mean they all spoke Russian. Danilova, one of my main teachers, you know, would appear at class, you know, dressed in sort of pastel chiffons and false eyelashes curled and elaborate makeup and hair do's and there was like a kind of very, very old world perfume and etiquette to the life there. So for me it was quite an extraordinary experience.

It was one I struggled with at times because there was also, you know, with that a very, very clear sort of, as I saw it at the time, authoritarian impulse so that, you know, you were really expected to do what you were told and you were not meant to ask questions. And, you know, I remember facing one of my teachers and saying, well, I just can't do it that way because I had some theory about why I couldn't do it that way. You know, and she just looked at me with her stick and sort of just prodded my legs and said, you know, Jennifer, more.

(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)

HOMANS: And that was it, you know? Just do it my way. And so, you know, there was that element to it as well.

GROSS: If there was an authoritarian side to Balanchine's company it sounds like there was also a very spiritual side. He was Russian Orthodox and you say that partly because of his faith, he believed that music and dance were sacred arts and that one finds God through the senses. Did you experience that when you were dancing?

HOMANS: Oh, very much so. I mean that was the - that was the reason to dance, and that's the main thing that one experienced on a sort of daily basis. You know, there is something almost religious about ballet and about being a dancer. It's a commitment, the ritual of going to class everyday, of being with people and performing these great works. And when you work very hard and you achieve a kind of coordination and skill in the body, there is a way in which it sets you free. And, you know, if you're doing these beautiful movements to music and you manage to get it all right, which doesn't happen all the time, but when you do, it is an extraordinary and transcendent experience.

GROSS: Your book ends with you saying, something important really is over. We are in mourning. Classical ballet has always been an art of belief. It does not fare well in cynical times. It's an art of high ideals and self control in which proportion and grace stand for an inner truth, an elevated state of being. Today we no longer believe in ballet's ideals. We are skeptical of elitism and skill which seem to us exclusionary and divisive.

So do you think it's over and do you think that has to do with the times that we live in?

HOMANS: I do think that something very big and important is over. You know, the whole era that we've been talking about, this great 20th century modernist moment is no more. I mean and, you know, that's not a criticism, it's just a historical fact. I mean a lot of the people who are, who were important to it have died and we do live in a sort of different kind of aesthetic era now.

If you look back over the history of ballet and you see that at certain points in the history, ballet has been really, really central to culture, a kind of very important thing that people talk about, that matters enormously. I think one of the problems is that it is, in fact, more conservative today than it has been in a very long time. You know, we are very concerned today with preserving the classics, with sort of holding on and making sure that they are in good shape and being performed well. That's - there's nothing wrong with that. That's sort of the tradition and we need that.

The problem is that that's not quite enough. And the new work it seems to me, to be very, very overwhelmed with steps, with a kind of athleticism and bravura that doesn't move people particularly and, you know, I'm not sure where the vision is or where it's all going to go. It may pick up and find a new spot, and that's certainly, you know, I will be the first person to be on my feet applauding if that were to happen.

GROSS: You danced until you were 26. Why did you stop?

HOMANS: I stopped because although I still - I mean, I loved to dance. It was an absolute passion with me, and I think I still loved to dance when I stopped, but it was almost a message from my own body in a way. I mean I just -I had had an injury. I, during the injury I had done a lot of reading and I had kind of developed a routine for myself where I would read and write and I had my kind of control of my own time and I had my own schedule and, you know, when I went back to dancing, I just, you know, it was almost like physically I just couldn't do it anymore. I just didn't really want to as much as I loved to dance. It sounds strange but I just kind of reached a brick wall.

And I think part of what was going on was that I was always pulled sort of towards the life of the mind as well as the life of the body, if you want to put it that way and, you know, I knew that I wanted to study and to read more and resume my education. I had not been to college and so, you know, I think I saw it as an opportunity, really that here was a moment where I could stop dancing and I could start something brand new at an age where I was still young enough to be able to make something of it without too, too much difficulty, and so I did that. I have to say that stopping was much harder than I thought it would be.

GROSS: Well, Jennifer Homans, thank you so much for talking with us.

HOMANS: Thank you very much.

DAVIES: Jennifer Homans' book "Apollo's Angels: A History of Ballet" is now out on paperback. She spoke to Terry last December. You can read an excerpt on our website, freshair.npr.org.

Coming up, Lloyd Schwartz reviews some recordings of Wilhelm Furtwangler, regarded as one of the greatest musicians of the 20th century. This is FRESH AIR.

DAVE DAVIES, HOST:

The German director Wilhelm Furtwangler, for many years the music director of the Berlin Philharmonic, is regarded as one of the greatest musicians of the 20th century. But a choice he made during the Second World War cast a shadow over his reputation here. Still, his recordings exist, and three new box sets have been issued by EMI.

Classical music critic Lloyd Schwartz has a review.

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LLOYD SCHWARTZ, BYLINE: Wilhelm Furtwangler's name may be hard for Americans to pronounce, but the reason this great conductor is not so well-remembered here is that he chose to remain in Germany during the Second World War, though he was never a member of the Nazi Party, and he was completely exonerated by a postwar tribunal.

He said he wanted to stay in Germany in order to keep authentic German musical culture alive. Musicians who encouraged him to leave regarded him as politically naive. We know he was not unwilling to perform for Hitler, but also that he helped Jewish musicians. After the war, he was appointed music director of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, but after numerous protests, the offer was rescinded.

His conducting is masterful, but also controversial. In the longstanding debate between conductors who think a musical score is a sacred text from which no departures should be permitted and those who regard the score as a launching pad from which a musical genius can take flight, Furtwangler was definitively in the latter camp. He thought music-making was as natural as breathing: He even once compared an orchestra to a flock of birds. His conducting is organic, inspired, urgent, and on the largest scale and never self-serving. He may be both the most romantic of the great conductors and the most mysteriously and intensely spiritual. He could bring out surprising depths in even the most familiar music.

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SCHWARTZ: Furtwangler concentrated on German and Eastern European composers, with legendary performances of Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven - especially his postwar Beethoven "9th Symphony" - Brahms, Schubert, Schumann and the massive musical cathedrals of Bruckner. He may be especially admired for his Wagner.

He made the most famous recording of "Tristan und Isolde," with the Norwegian heroic soprano Kirsten Flagstad as the Irish princess who comes to equate love and death, pouring out impassioned, golden tone - although her high C is actually Elisabeth Schwarzkopf's. Furtwangler also recorded an astounding complete "Ring of the Nibelungen": four operas that take up 13 CDs, some 15 hours of music.

He plays this music as if it were a vast ocean, pulsating waves of tension and release that - as Wagner wanted - never seem to stop. And he's totally inside the notes.

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC "RING OF THE NIBELUNGEN")

SCHWARTZ: For opera lovers, his complete "Ring Cycle" is one of the new Furtwangler sets on EMI, and a 21-disc set called "The Great EMI Recordings" features "Tristan" and Beethoven's only opera, the heroic "Fidelio." This set also includes most of Furtwangler's great symphonic and concerto performances, mostly with the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra, and the touching slow movement from his own piano concerto.

He was a serious composer, though maybe too much under the influence of Mahler, whom as a conductor he mainly ignored. There's also an illuminating documentary, with revealing clips of Furtwangler in rehearsal.

(SOUNDBITE OF REHEARSAL)

WILHELM FURTWANGLER: No, no, no, no, no, no. (Foreign language spoken)

UNIDENTIFIED MAN: (Singing a note)

FURTWANGLER: (Foreign language spoken)

UNIDENTIFIED MAN: (Singing)

FURTWANGLER: (Foreign language spoken)

UNIDENTIFIED MAN: (Singing)

FURTWANGLER: (Foreign language spoken) Good.

SCHWARTZ: My only reservation about these new issues is that an entire disc of the 3-CD set called "Furtwangler: The Legacy" repeats the same material from the 21-CD set. If you're inclined to completeness, you'd wind up with significant duplication. Still, it's a treat to be able to immerse oneself so deeply in the art of this magnificent musician, however unsettlingly complex a personality he may have been.

DAVIES: Lloyd Schwartz is classical music editor of the Boston Phoenix and teaches in the MFA program at the University of Massachusetts, Boston. He reviewed three new sets on EMI devoted to the conducting of Wilhelm Furtwangler. Wagner's complete "Ring Cycle," the great EMI recordings, and "Wilhelm Furtwangler: The Legacy." Coming up, David Edelstein reviews the new "Mission: Impossible" film. This is FRESH AIR.

DAVE DAVIES, HOST:

The espionage TV series "Mission: Impossible" aired from 1966 to 1973. In 1996, the show became a film series starring Tom Cruise who returns for the fourth installment, "Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol." It's directed by animator Brad Bird making his live action debut. Film critic David Edelstein has accepted the mission to review it.

DAVID EDELSTEIN, BYLINE: The fourth "Mission: Impossible" picture titled "Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol" is nonsense from beginning to end - and wonderful fun. The director is Brad Bird, of "Ratatouille" and "The Incredibles" and "The Iron Giant," and there's no doubt now, in his live-action debut, that he's a filmmaker first and an animator second. Part four is in a different league from its predecessors.

Not that the other Mission: Impossible films have been terrible. It's just the direction they took from the start was annoying. The TV series was deadly dull, but it had two big things going for it: an exciting eight-note motif by Lalo Schifrin that stirringly evoked the rapidly burning fuse in the opening credits; and the notion of a team of poker-faced professional good guys functioning as high-tech con artists, donning lifelike masks to impersonate their marks and coordinating their stings with clockwork precision.

When Tom Cruise decided to produce and star in the movie version, he kept Schifrin's theme and threw out the team. His agent, Ethan Hunt, always ended up the James Bond lone wolf going mano-a mano against the latest super-villain. Directors Brian De Palma, John Woo and J.J. Abrams did what they could to make the films work, but it was Cruise's party, and Cruise's tiresome ego trip.

For whatever reason, Ghost Protocol shifts the focus back to the notion of teamwork. Writers Josh Appelbaum and Andre Nemec bring three other characters to the fore: Simon Pegg plays the chatterbox tech-whiz Benji, Paula Patton is driven agent Jane Carter, and, most intriguingly, Jeremy Renner is the anxious policy analyst William Brandt, who finds himself onboard when his boss is assassinated and ghost protocol is invoked.

That's when the agency - the IMF - is disavowed by the U.S. government and its agents become fugitives. I won't bore you with plot synopsis except to say there's a madman who wants a nuclear war so Earth can start over, and he's very determined. But our heroes are more so.

Their early robbery of the Kremlin turns out to be their easiest operation: It is called "Mission: Impossible," not "Mission: Very, Very Hard." Next, Ethan has to scale the tallest building in the world in Dubai, with a dust storm approaching, the mask-making machine malfunctioning, and two sets of deadly terrorists to deceive on two different floors.

Bird and his screenwriters have a great comic conceit. First they have us marveling at the precision and the ingenuity of the high-tech devices, which are better than James Bond's, and then they have us laughing and/or crying out when something breaks down and the team has to improvise madly.

I don't know why Cruise throws the ball so much to Renner - it's not characteristic. But he's very likable as the younger man's coach, and Renner's what-am-I-doing-here vibe makes for funny scenes. He can't bring himself to trust Benji's levitating suit. And who could, really?

(SOUNDBITE OF MOVIE, "MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE - GHOST PROTOCOL")

JEREMY RENNER: (As Brandt) Okay. So we head to the party separately as guests. Ethan quarterbacks while Jane gets the...

SIMON PEGG: (As Benji) Gets the cards from the billionaire. I switch off the fan, you jump into the computer array and I catch you. You plug in the transmitter, then Ethan feeds me the codes which I then use to pinpoint Hendricks' location.

RENNER: (as Brandt) Okay. You breezed over something I think really important. The computer array part where I just...jump.

PEGG: (As Benji) And I catch you.

RENNER: (As Brandt) Yeah.

PEGG: (as Benji) I don't – why is that so hard to grasp?

RENNER: (as Brandt) Well, why? It's a 25-foot drop.

PEGG: (as Benji) I'd be more worried about the heat.

RENNER: (as Brandt) And then there's that. What heat?

PEGG: (as Benji) Well, it's like any computer, isn't it? If you switch off the fan it's going to get really hot.

RENNER: (As Brandt) Of course.

PEGG: (as Benji) Relatively, you know.

RENNER: (as Brandt) Of course it will. So I'm - I'm jumping into an – an oven, essentially.

PEGG: (As Benji) Yeah. Essentially. But, I'll catch you.

RENNER: (as Brandt) Great.

EDELSTEIN: The structure of "Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol" owes something to "Inception," and at the risk of outraging the fanboys, I think Brad Bird and editor Paul Hirsch do a better, more elegant job of juggling multiple climaxes.

The finale, in an automated parking garage in Mumbai - yes, they go from Dubai to Mumbai - is as intricate as the rising and falling elevator arcade game "Donkey Kong," and it's helped, as is everything else, by composer Michael Giacchino, who does more variations on Schifrin's theme than Beethoven did on Diabelli's.

I should note the film opens this week on IMAX screens, next week on regular ones, and it's worth a drive and a surcharge for IMAX. The long traveling shot over desert dunes toward that ridiculous vertical metropolis Dubai is breathtaking, and so are the views later on from above Cruise's head looking 130 stories down. You'll feel your fight-or-flight instincts kicking in, but don't worry: Brad Bird will catch you.

DAVIES: David Edelstein is film critic for New York Magazine.

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