There's no city-clogging traffic jam in Nine, the musicalized version of Federico Fellini's movie-about-moviemaking urtext 8 1/2, but the result feels like the celluloid equivalent of a 12-car pileup. An assault on the senses from every conceivable direction—smash zooms, the ear-splitting eruption of something like music, the spectacle of a creature called Kate Hudson—Nine thrashes about in search of "cinema" the way a child thrown into the deep end of a pool flails for a flotation device. Earlier this decade, watching choreographer-turned-director Rob Marshall make an incoherent, Oscar-anointed shambles out of Bob Fosse's Chicago—a movie aptly described by one critic as a musical for people who hate movie musicals—I wondered if Marshall had ever seen a screen musical before he got the assignment. Watching Nine, I began to wonder if Marshall has ever seen a movie other than his own.
A desperate bid by Marshall and embattled producer Harvey Weinstein to recapture the "magic" of their previous awards-season thoroughbred, Nine was adapted by The Player author Michael Tolkin and the late Anthony Minghella from a Tony-winning Broadway musical that itself transformed Fellini's acerbic self-portrait of a creatively blocked, serial womanizing director into a treacly fable about getting in touch with one's inner child. Originally produced in 1982 with Raul Julia as the Fellini surrogate, Guido Contini, and revived two decades later with Antonio Banderas in the part, the show itself was never anyone's idea of a classic. But upon recently comparing the two stage versions at the New York Public Library's invaluable Theatre on Film and Tape archive, I was struck by how much theatrical lemonade director David Leveaux's revival was able to make out of the lemons of the stage original—by shortening or excising a couple of the more egregious songs and forgoing the initial production's stagnant steam-bath set in favor of a more intimate, abstract use of space.
For the film adaptation, in which Daniel Day-Lewis dons Guido's signature black hat, the writers have further slashed and burned, all but eviscerating the play's turgid second half and relegating the myriad women in Guido's life—wife (Marion Cotillard), mistress (Penélope Cruz), mother (Sophia Loren), muse (Nicole Kidman), confidante (Judi Dench)—to one forgettable song apiece.
Extravagantly filmed on soundstages in London and locations in Rome, Nine may be the shiniest package underneath this holiday movie season's tree, but all the Oscar winners in the world in front of and behind the camera can't disguise the absentee landlord at the helm. Perhaps hoping to channel something of Fellini's own improvisational energy, Marshall proceeds without a map, shooting in an arbitrary mixture of color and black-and-white, while his cast slips in and out of a smattering of different accents. Then come the fantasy musical numbers, most of which take place on a soundstage where the sets for Contini's new film are under construction, and which Marshall uniformly shoots with one camera dollying back and forth on a semicircular track and another zooming in and out on the glittering, spangled couture. Those scenes are then haphazardly intercut with the movie's "real" action, resulting in the sort of unwieldy mélange that is sometimes said to have been "saved in the editing room," but not in this case.
There have been and will continue to be great movies made about the struggle of megalomaniacal directors to reconcile their life and work—Fosse made one with his own musical Fellini homage, All That Jazz, and Charlie Kaufman another just last year with Synecdoche, New York. Failing those high-water marks, Nine might at least have been a guiltily pleasurable burlesque, were Marshall not so intent on turning all his grande dames into vamped-up grotesques. While Fergie emerges relatively unscathed, in part because her role—the feral prostitute Saraghina, from whom the chaste young Guido learns the facts of life—is meant to be a vamped-up grotesque, poor Hudson (as an enterprising Vogue reporter) may never recover from gyrating her way through the atrocious "Cinema Italiano." Wisely keeping her distance, Cotillard mostly lurks along the sidelines, projecting a wounded visage, before finally stepping into the spotlight for the movie's single moment of emotional sincerity. It's the only point at which Nine seems more than a total zero.
