NINE -the review

Finally I get around to posting my review of the musical Nine, which ran in The Weekend Australian's print edition a few ago but not online.

Have to say I was surprised and somewhat baffled by the level of vitriol levelled at this film by some US and Australian critics. I can accept people finding flaws in the film (I found some myself). I can't accept the idea that it's abject rubbish - a judgement that only makes sense to me if you accept that many critics dislike the musical genre. Here, for what it's worth, is what I thought:

Nine is the follow-up musical to director Rob Marshall’s Oscar-winning Chicago and again it’s based on a stage show, this time one dating based on a classic film, Federico Fellini’s 8 ½.

That 1963 film starred Marcello Mastroianni as a movie director named Guido undergoing a creative crisis as he prepared to direct his latest production, assailed by the expectations of his mistress, his wife, his fans and his collaborators.

The film made a huge impact on critics, filmmakers and lovers of European cinema for two principal reasons, the first being its daringly self-referential nature (Fellini clearly based Guido upon himself and was undergoing his own creative crisis ).

The second reason was the bold way it folded together Guido’s present tense life with enactments of his memories, dreams and fantasies without ever clearly marking the boundaries. This was not quite unprecedented - Ingmar Bergman’s 1957 Wild Strawberries was an obvious precursor – but Fellini took the technique somewhere new, intensely personal and stylish.

Nine is not the first to have been been inspired (either directly or indirectly) by 8 ½ - witness Woody Allen’s Stardust Memories and a year earlier, Bob Fosse’s All That Jazz. The latter used Fellini’s template for a musical based on Fosse’s own life (again the material was first made as a stage musical), resulting in a masterpiece.

Marshall has, then, a lot to live up too. His major advantage is an all-star cast centering on Daniel Day-Lewis as Guido. The melancholic director is surrounded by the significant women in his life, played mostly by Oscar-winners: Sophia Loren (his mother), Penelope Cruz (lover), Marion Cotillard (wife), Nicole Kidman (leading lady), Judi Dench (costume designer). Oscar nominee Kate Hudson appears as a journalist and would-be seducer, and singer Fergie plays a whore from Guido’s childhood.
Unlike the Fellini and Fosse films, Nine has a fairly simple, almost predictable structure: Guido’s present tense story (wanders off from media conference, runs off to coastal resort with his mistress, etc) is punctuated by song-and-dance numbers at regular intervals, each featuring one of the aforementioned women.

The songs are not especially memorable, which you can also say about most contemporary musicals, though they’re performed and staged with a verve that I found mostly entertaining. The female star power varies in its dazzle, though. The roles of Loren and Kidman are brief and under-written. Cotillard is moving, Cruz is fine except that her song and dance routine seems to have been conceived for a woman with much longer legs. Marshall has not flattered her.

What holds the film together is Day-Lewis. After his get-me-an-Oscar performance in There Will be Blood, he again plays a larger than life character but here his performance is all the more compelling for being contained. The film is not in the same class as All That Jazz, but as a flashy musical entertainment it delivers a charge.