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Canwest News Service
Not too many people are going to come singing and dancing out of Nine, a musical about an Italian film director who can't make his new film because he can't think of what to make it about. Until the end, when he makes it about exactly that. It's Nine: writer's block with a chorus line!
If this story sounds vaguely familiar, that's because it's based on Federico Fellini's movie 8 1/2, which was about self-absorbed filmmaker Guido Contini – "The scenes I love to see / from Guido's P.O.V.," goes one of the songs from Nine, meant to be an ode to the director's vision – who was stuck for a subject, all the while being tormented and tantalized by memories of the many women in his life. This film, which starred Marcello Mastroianni, was adapted into a Broadway show and has now returned to the screen.
It has lost some of its sparkle in the various translations, and what we have left is a stylish, self-referential showcase for just about every actress who has won an Oscar in the past two decades, set to a tuneless score and dragged down by clunky lyrics ("My husband makes movies / to make them he lives a kind of dream / in which his actions are not always as they seem." All together, now.) There is hardly any dancing, unless you count the sight of Penelope Cruz writhing around in her lingerie and pointing out various features of her body ("I need you to squeeze me here and here and here") in another song that's unlikely to make it to Tony Bennett's next album. However, it should be on multiple YouTube downloads by the time you read this.
Nevertheless, it is Cruz and her several co-stars who give Nine its air of sexy interest. The film stars Daniel Day-Louis as Guido, the Fellini stand-in, as he fails to pull together a script for his new project, to be called Italia. "You kill your film several times, mostly by talking about it," he tells the press in the opening sequence, but it turns out he's not talking about it, because there's nothing to say.
Meanwhile, Guido is bedevilled by the many women in his life, each of whom gets to sing one song about what he means to them, except for Marion Cotillard as Luisa, his long-suffering wife. She gets two songs, perhaps to make up for her difficult life ("My husband only rarely comes to bed / my husband makes movies instead.") Cruz is Carla, his mistress, who shows a pleasant singing voice, as does Nicole Kidman as Claudia, Carlo's icy leading lady and sometime lover ("In a very unusual way / you were my friend.")
Kate Hudson plays Stephanie, a fashion journalist who has a clever number about Guido's mise en scene; Stacy Ferguson, the singer from Black Eyed Peas, stops the show as a prostitute who leads a chorus of women banging tambourines and flinging sand on a beach; and Judi Dench gets into the act as Guido's costume designer and a former Folies Bergeres dancer. (Maury Yeston, who wrote the songs, rhymes the name of that institution with "despair," a hint at Nine's essential emotion.) Sophia Loren, as Guido's iconic mother, has aged past the point of beauty: She looks like a statue made of tanned flesh and erected in tribute to Sophia Loren.
These characters fill us in on Guido's busy love life – he was apparently the Tiger Woods of Italian cinema – as he tries to juggle various infidelities and keep true to his real mistress, the movies themselves.
It's nicely mounted by director Rob Marshall, who brought a similar sense of style to Chicago, and also a similar feeling of remove, as if we were watching a documentary about the show rather than the show itself. It's very beautiful in a smoky way, its black-and-white inserts hinting at a cinematic richness in Guido's past.
But it's not as evocative as 8 1/2 itself, nor as richly Italian – everyone speaks English with Italian accents that meander from acceptable (Day-Lewis) to eccentric (Kidman) – and at the end, there's a hollow feeling. If Nine was the best he could do, Guido seems to have wasted several fabulous women.
For Jay Stone's weekly movie podcast, go to www.canada.com/moviereviews.
jstone@canwest.com
canada.com/stonereport
CAPSULE REVIEW – Nine: The film version of the stage musical (based on Fellini's 8 1/2) is a tuneless story about a film director (Daniel Day-Lewis) who can't think of a script for his new movie and is haunted by the many women (including Penelope Cruz, Sophia Loren, Nicole Kidman and others) who made him what he is. It's a stylish but somewhat dispirited exercise that marks no advance on the original movie itself. Three stars out of five – Jay Stone
