Nine

Woody Allen had a joke in his stand-up act that he was working on a new project: Taking the musical My Fair Lady and removing the music and lyrics and turning it back into Pygmalion. I thought of that while watching Nine, and wishing I could remove almost everything about it and turn it back into its source, Federico Fellini's masterpiece 8½.

To be fair, this film is twice-removed from Fellini, as it based more closely on a Broadway musical which I have never seen. But no matter how you look at it, Nine is a terrible movie, that fails on almost every level: direction, screenplay, editing, acting. The only pluses are the design, which earned a few Oscar nominations. But even that is problematic, as we are told we are in Italy in the early 1960s, but nothing about the film suggests our time and place other than those title cards.

The story is a ghost of Fellini's. A famed director (Daniel Day-Lewis, horribly miscast) is experiencing creative block as he plans his new movie. He is married to a dutiful wife (Marion Cottillard) but also has a flighty mistress (Penelope Cruz). He is besieged on all sides--the press, his producers, his design team, his performers--and as he undergoes his crisis he flashes back to times in his youth.

Anyone who has seen 8½ will understand that this is that film as if someone had filtered it through burlap. Fellini was so much more comprehensive in presenting the life of a creative man, but what we have here is drivel. None of it is compelling, and the whole thing seems to be trivial. We really don't care at all about Day-Lewis or any of his problems.

The director is Rob Marshall. I liked Chicago, but after seeing Nine I wonder if he only had one good movie in him or if someone else was responsible for what was good about that film. He seems here to have no conception of how to tell a story, and isn't help by choppy editing that amounts to overkill. A number involving Kate Hudson (a character created for this film) is a case in point. Called "Cinema Italiano," it's about the things she loves about Italian cinema, but ends up being a laundry list--guys with skinny black ties, sports cars, etc.--that was prepared by someone who really knew nothing about Italian movies. The scene is edited within an inch of its life, and goes from color to black and white and back again in a fevered pace. It's a mess.

Perhaps the best example of how the whole thing fails Fellini is the scene most closely lifted from 8½, the one involving La Saraghina, the prostitute that the young Day-Lewis visits as a boy. In the Fellini, she is both a seductress and a monster, a zaftig creature that haunts the imagination. In Nine, she is played by Fergie, and though she has a fine, Broadway-style voice to sing "Be Italian," there is none of the mystery of the scene--she's just another pretty face. And what, exactly, does "Be Italian" mean--she's singing to a bunch of Italian boys. What else could they be but Italian?

Speaking of Italy, this film tries hard to be steeped in Italy. It's set at Cinecitta studios, and the film-within-the-film is called Italia. But to me this film seemed as authentically Italian as the gondola rides at the Venetian hotel in Las Vegas. Part of the problem is having almost no Italians among the major cast members (to be fair, Fellini did have non-Italians such as Anouk Aimee and Claudia Cardinale in 8½). Day-Lewis is totally lost, Nicole Kidman is wooden, Judi Dench is no singer (her number, a tribute to the Folies Bergere, seems to have been carted in from another movie) and Cruz, who was Oscar-nominated, works hard but is also at sea. I did admire Cottillard's work, though her singing voice isn't very strong.

I don't know if it's possible for an adaptation of the stage show to be successful, but Marshall doesn't help by having his musical numbers garish and cliched as those seen on cruise ships. It's clear that he have had appreciation but no understanding of what made the Fellini film great. And to that end I have watched the original to get the bad taste of Nine out of my mouth. I'll post an essay about that film later this week.