NINE
2009 - Rob Marshall
The much-anticipated Musical with the all-star cast and the director of the Best Picture winning
Chicago is a bit of a misfire. The big screen adaptation of the Tony Award winning Broadway hit of the early 1980s (starring the late Raul Julia) which was itself a stage adaptation of Federico Fellini's legendary
8½ (1963), which is itself a thinly-veiled bit of playful post modern autobiography about a director who can't seem to finish making his latest movie as the experiences of his past, present and dreams collide. The film,
Nine, has the same basic plot of
8½ with Daniel Day-Lewis as Guido Contini, an aging director in 1965 Italy who doesn't even have a script yet for his latest project, which is supposedly days away from beginning. Artistically he is blocked, and in the opening scene we see him try to envision characters on his empty set, various muses who we will quickly learn are all modeled on the women of his life: his wife Luisa (Marion Cotillard), his Mother (Sophia Loren), leading actress Claudia (Nicole Kidman), his mistress Carla (Penélope Cruz), his costume designer and professional confidant (Judi Dench), an American fashion reporter (Kate Hudson) and a whore he visited as a young boy (played by Grammy-winner Fergie). As Guido tries to juggle these women and his memories the filmmaking is postponed. Of course being a Musical each has at least one number of their own.
While it's probably unfair to compare
Nine to
Chicago it's also inevitable.
Nine simply has none of the wit and energy of
Chicago. Because the characters are deliberately left as archetypes rather than real people there really isn't much to get invested in emotionally, the songs aren't at all memorable overall, and for a movie about moviemaking it is awfully uncinematic over and over again, adhering far too much to its stage roots instead of the movie lineage a layer deeper. Strange. As an example of how it fails to take advantage of the medium, Fellini's
8½ opens with a fantastic sequence of Guido stuck in a traffic jam in a tunnel. After his car fills with smoke he climbs out the window and flies away to find himself tethered like a kite on a coastline and when his cord is yanked he plummets to the sea only to awake in a shot, stressed about making the movie. While it would have been silly and maybe even deadly to replicate that
exact Fellini sequence, it is precisely the kind of energy and imagination that is just about completely absent from Marshall's film. That such elaborate fantasies weren't attempted on the Broadway stage in 1982 is understandable. That Marshall working in film in 2009 doesn't try to capture that kind of sequence in any way is a huge missed opportunity and baffling to me.
The actors, most of whom have won Oscars in their careers, are all quite good, as you'd expect, but sadly are given so little to work with. Day-Lewis is at his sexiest, and his Guido going from bed to bed as he delays making a movie he can't quite imagine is an elegant and striking figure for him to cut in his fine suits and lithe movements. His Italian accent is wonderful (unlike Nicole Kidman's, which is pretty weak). The other stars pretty much get to use their own accents naturally, which helps. But while Cotillard and Cruz especially get some very nice moments, they aren't grounded in much character and very little story. Penélope is sexy as Hell and the scenes between her and Daniel in the cheap hotel are among
Nine's best. But other than some nice moments, it never comes together as something more than a sum of its parts. The songs are pretty dull, operetta style with looser rhyme schemes, and the only real showstopper when it comes to the singing and dancing is Fergie as the whore Saraghina, with "Be Italian". The other actors, including Day-Lewis, do fine and dandy with the songs, but when it gets to the one person in the cast who can
really belt out a tune...wow, you can't help but notice the difference.
And to compare unfairly to
Chicago again, there is nothing as witty or character-based in this movie as "Mister Cellophane" or "Razzle Dazzle" in
Nine. And considering the original Fellini movie ended with the entire cast literally dancing together you'd expect that perhaps
Nine might at least get that right...but again, a missed opportunity, a false, flat, boring note where there should be an aria, or at least a carnival.
But that isn't to say
Nine is an unwatchable disaster or anything either, it certainly isn't. The charm and talent of the cast, especially Day-Lewis, Cruz, Cotillard and Fergie, save it. But there's nothing extraordinary or dreamlike or, dare I say, Felliniesque about it either. Retranslating this material back to the cinema could have yielded magic. Instead it's a slick but oddly unambitious and unengaging exercise in style that seems to have missed what is enduring about
8½ and cinema itself.
GRADE: C+
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worth seeing 