Sunday Review: Nine

Geoff:
The first time I heard about Nine as a musical version of Fellini’s 8½, I thought, “Man, they will take and add song-and-dance numbers to anything these days.” Now that I’ve seen it, I can’t say that I’ve been asked to think much differently

Rob Marshall (Chicago, Memoirs of a Geisha) directs Daniel Day-Lewis as Guido Contini, an Italian director beset by writer’s block as production for his latest feature film looms just days away. Day-Lewis plays Guido very well (would you expect any different?) as a cock-sure asshole driven by libido who’s reached a point in his life of almost pure self-centeredness and ego.  He seems no longer able to tell the moments when he’s being sincere from those when he’s simply lying in order to feel like he’s still a kind, decent, and honorable person. The plot follows him as he encounters the different women in his life, his wife (Marion Cotillard), his motherly costume designer (Judi Dench), his mistress (Penelope Cruz), his lead actress (Nicole Kidman), an admiring American critic (Kate Hudson), and as he remembers other women from his life, his real mother (Sophia Loren) and a beach-dwelling prostitute (Fergie). Each woman is given her own musical number (and Day-Lewis gets his own, too) as Guido struggles with his own emptiness and tries to shed the mental, emotional and sexual crutch that comes with constant admiration from others.

Some of the music is fun, and at times the dancing (or at least what there is of it, though Day-Lewis, Cotillard, and Kidman never really engage in any big synchronized numbers with other people) is, too. But so much of it feels unnecessary, in a way that goes beyond acknowledging the fact that every song in a musical is technically unnecessary. Kate Hudson’s song about Italian cinema during her seduction of Guido, for instance, is catchy but only serves to add an extra 5 minutes to what could have been a thirty-second battle against temptation. Because of such extraneous scenes, the movie just feels long after a while, and before it’s even close to over, it’s hard to care anymore.

I think part of the blame goes to the folks who thought this story should be turned into a musical in the first place.  Granted, I don’t know how much of this is accurate, but here’s the Wikipedia description of the film’s debts:  “The screenplay, by Michael Tolkin and Anthony Minghella,[2] is based on Arthur Kopit’s book for the 1982 Tony Award-winning musical of the same name, which was derived from an Italian play by Mario Fratti inspired by Federico Fellini’s autobiographical film 8½.”

So, a movie adaptation of a stage musical inspired by a play that itself was inspired by another film? It’s the creative equivalent of a game of telephone, and with it comes a gradual watering-down and blurring of the original film’s intended message and effect. I’d rather just rewatch 8½ instead.

Susan:
I was also not a fan of the film, for the reasons you mentioned and also because I felt like it offered basically nothing to a female viewer other than close-ups of a brooding Daniel Day-Lewis.  I don’t know about you, female readers, but stories about singular male genius and its weight and how singular male geniuses become assholes but it’s sort of okay because they are, you know, singular male geniuses are kind of played out for me.  I liked it better the first time when it was any conversation about Ernest Hemingway.  Or like, the Marquis de Sade or something.  Regardless, what I’m saying here is that while Daniel Day-Lewis can make almost anyone sympathetic because he is so awesome and good looking and what not, I felt like the women in the film were projecting an idea of femininity or womanhood not based on the actual experience of women or of being a woman.  It seemed like what men who love musical theater might want women to be like or might think “strong” women are like.  Basically, what I’m trying to say is that when the end credits rolled and the writers were men, I thought to myself, Oh, of course they are.

We’ve all fallen in love with someone because they were really really awesome at something, only to find out later that that probably wasn’t the best idea we ever had.  I’m not saying it’s completely implausible that otherwise awesome women might get stupid over some loser filmmaker.  HOWEVER, his mistress tries to kill herself over him??  Seriously??  And then his amazing famous actress muse reveals that she is ALSO in love with him??  And despite having worked on all of his films before, his wife (who used to be his lead actress) doesn’t realize that he feeds the same line of shit to all the young ingenues until the screen tests for his NINTH film??  The only woman in the film I believed was Kate Hudson (though that musical number was maybe the worst thing I’ve ever seen ever and made me squirm like I was watching the seduction scene in Orphan) because at my core, I totally believe that Kate Hudson, were she a Vogue fashion reporter in the 1960s, would have thrown herself in a not-even-kind-of-coy way at whatever famous brooding dude they put in front of her.  And I used to like Kate Hudson so much.

My point is, blech.  This movie was at best boring and at worst kind of offensive.  Judi Dench and Daniel Day-Lewis both turn in stellar acting performaces, and Fergie brought some serious AWESOME during her “Be Italian” musical number, but none of that was enough to salvage what seemed, in the end, to be some sort of male meditation on what the great women who remain behind a great man look like, complete with mediocre musical numbers and an extensive display of Mommy Issues.

Geoff:
‘Tis true. This is a musical for dudes, specifically for creatively crippled dudes who dream of bedding beautiful women while receiving advice, care, and affection from an older matriarch (or in this case, a couple of them).  Maybe someone should write Alfie: The Musical, too, or possibly even Adaptation: The Musical (let’s all please do everything in our power to stop this from happening).

I do like the wife as played by Cotillard. I think she does a better job bringing that character to life than a lot of actors could have, so much so that I can believe the wife’s choice to try to stick with her husband, even after learning about his continued affair but before finding out about his tendency to woo every pretty face that happened to sit in front of his camera (and a sidenote regarding these scenes in front of the camera: Laura Mulvey would have a field day about male gaze and the whole camera-as-phallus thing [film nerd reference; sorry]). But you have a point, Susan, that a woman as smart and as wise as Cotillard makes the wife seem like she would have been quicker in finding out she’d been fed a line. I guess I’ll just have to wait for her to be in some better movies.

Really, the same thing could be said for nearly all the women in this film. Dench is good, yes, but she never stood out to me because her role is so thankless. The script apportions her what, a smattering of fifteen to twenty lines and a musical number? And what good is gleaned from those lines is all thanks to her own talent in delivering them. Cruz as well manages to throw more fun and then despair into that what could have been an even more 2-D mistress role than it ends up being.

Basically, it seems like the actors put in most of the work here, and some props should go to the production and costume designers as well, but please, when the award nominations come around, please don’t hand the writers a best adapted screenplay nomination for drastically reducing the complexity of the characters in a work three degrees removed from its original source.

Susan:
I also hope they don’t start handing out Oscars to people like Kate Hudson and Nicole Kidman who did basically nothing in the film just because they sing or whatever.  Or, if you are going to give an Oscar to someone who did basically nothing but sing in the film, give it to Fergie for being totally, mind-blowingly awesome/better than you would think she would be and also seeming to gain some weight for the role (which, as I have mentioned before, I love).

I suppose the core of my review would be this:  In the age of the internet and YouTube (FIRST POST OF 2010 Y’ALL — WE LIVE IN THE FUTURE), you can watch the good musical numbers from this film (Fergie; Judi Dench; Penelope Cruz if you’re looking for T&A) without having to suffer though the bad (Nicole Kidman; Kate Hudson; Daniel Day-Lewis) and without having to deal with the whole played-out, singular-male-genius plot line.  Do yourself a favor:  google “Fergie Be Italian” and save yourself the ten bucks.