Nine Thoughts I Had On... Nine

In lieu of a traditional review of Rob Marshall's Nine, which opens Friday in limited release and then expands a week later for the Christmas box office rush, I've opted for random thoughts, nine of them, strung together. This is a survival tactic. I've spent so long obsessing on the movie prior to its release (prior to even its casting given my enthusiasm for the mid-Aughts Broadway revival) that a review proper couldn't contain me. It would kill me. I got no choreography, I'll just have to spit out my words however they come out. Picture them flying from the blog like sand from Fergie's fingers

Beeeeeeeeee Italian. Beee Italian....

Story. The plot of Nine, as you may know, is about a film director Guido Contini (Daniel Day-Lewis) suffering an artistic crisis: His production team is ready to shoot, his costume designer (Judi Dench) is ready to stitch, his muse (Nicole Kidman) is ready to act but there's no script (!), no story even (!!!). I haven't read even one of the supposedly many negative reviews of Nine but surely some of them will gripe that the same is true of this movie. This is what's known as "missing the point". Nine is based on the stage musical Nine which is itself based on Federico Fellini's masterful 8½ and none of them have anything resembling a traditionally satisfying plot. Not the point. The original movie, the stage musical, and the new movie musical share a premise rather than a plot, which is the director's crisis. That's it. The concept is the plot. The rest is all flourish and curlicues of self awareness. It's the cinema as memoir or character study (only without the character... sort of. We'll get to that). Guido spends the movie running away from this crisis but the crisis follows him. You can't escape yourself.

"Guido... Ciao!" Guido, despite the character details embedded within his womanizing, his fame and general obsessiveness is not a fully fleshed-out character. I don't even think he was in original form in 8½ when he was played by Marcello Mastroianni though my memo

ry on this point might be faulty. It's been years since I've seen it. Guido is the stand-in for the offscreen author, around which everything swirls. This is why I think Daniel Day-Lewis is miscast. Here is an actor who is great at filling in details and what the role needs is someone upon whom the movie can project its issues. Day-Lewis is good at mapping out Guido's evasiveness and his oddly symbiotic self-regard and self-doubt but he's not good at being a blank slate for the man behind the curtain. Guido's most elaborately fleshed out incarnation was when he was called Joe Gideon in All That Jazz but that's another masterpiece altogether.

Or is it?

No Man Behind the Curtain In some ways though, Day-Lewis's detailing helps. For Nine doesn't come across as a self-portrait unless Rob Marshall is having a post Memoirs of a Geisha crisis. As well he should! All That Jazz is a far better musical interpretation of 8½ than Nine has ever been really, because it's also a self-portrait by a narcissistic but brilliant director. Nine the musical doesn't have and has never had that potent force of personality. But it does have...

Music. Which is delicious. I've heard a lot of griping from fellow critics that the songs aren't catchy but, right or wrong, I always view this particular gripe as a complaint of the unwashed masses, he said fully aware of his own musical snobbery. It's the same complaint you'll sometimes hear from tourists about Stephen Sondheim musicals. And Sondheim is a genius. The songs are just a little more challenging than those insant sing-a-longs that people who don't really love musicals want when they attend a musical. But even when you don't love a song, and I've listened to the original cast recording of Broadway's Nine revival hundreds of times and never found anything to love within "My Husband Makes Movies", one singer/actress's interpretation can change everything.

The Mrs. Marion Cotillard plays Luisa Contini and I call her a singer/actress because that's what she is. Her international breakthrough came while playing a singer (Edith Piaf in La Vie En Rose) but she wasn't actually singing in that film. Who knew? She sings so well that she's able to act through her vocals without the dread talk-singing that many actors opt for [*cough* Daniel Day-Lewis and Johnny Depp] when they're trying to sing. She's doing both simultaneously and organically and it's exceptionally pleasing to the eyes and ears. You can tell that Rob Marshall knows it, too. It's the one moment in the film where he seems to just slow down (Nine is very ADD in its editing, as is the habit of most movies, particularly action films and musicals) and watch and it's mesmerizing. It's so mesmerizing that one of my least favorite songs in the show suddenly reveals itself as the key song, the film's highlight.

My husband makes movies.
To make them he lives a kind of dream
In which his actions aren't always what they seem.
He may be on to some unique romantic theme.
Some men catch fish, some men tie flies, some earn their living baking bread.
My husband, he goes a little crazy...
Making movies instead.

The Cast. Not everyone fares as well. Kate Hudson can dance but she's saddled with an extraneous character and the worst number, a horrid if catchy song "Cinema Italiano" that was written for the film (for what purpose, I do not know. Perhaps to educate young audiences about mainstream America's fascination with foreign auteurs in the 50s and 60s?). I hate this song but suspect we'll be hearing it on the Oscar broadcast. Whatever my feelings about Kate Hudson, I hope she agrees to perform it. It sucks when movie stars are replaced by other people when the Oscar performance of their song rolls around.

The Song Score. I've tried but I can't let it go. I have no idea why Marshall thought it wise to remove "Nine" which is a far better number for Sophia Loren (playing Guido's Mamma) than the new lullaby she's given. And the film's title makes little sense without the number. Marshall has also removed "Simple" which is one of the best songs in the whole score, and which might have been a terrific way of pulling all the female supporting characters together. Nine in its new form has a distressing tendency to separate all its players on their own soundstages as if they're all figments of Guido's imagination. Even if that's a valid read of the story, it seems to me that they should start colliding once Guido's compartmentalized world starts crumbling. "Simple" was the number to do that. That said, the new number "Take It All" is a great addition, again focusing on Marion Cotillard's soulful performance and vocal prowess. She's so good in the film, she nearly justifies the restructured if rather more generic emphasis on Failed Marriage that this new Nine leans so heavily on. At the expense of...

The Muse & The Mistress. Claudia (Nicole Kidman) and Carla (Penélope Cruz) aren't quite as prominent here as they have been in past incarnations but both movie stars send jolts of electricity through the film with their diva entrances. Kidman is the first woman to enter the film, blissfully appropriately bathed in spotlight in the film's opening swirl of cast introductions. Claudia must have been the hardest role to cast, since the character isn't in much of the film but must convey something you can't act: global fame, untouchable star persona. I can't think of many actresses outside of Kidman who could have sold this role... possibly Angelina Jolie? So Kidman's vocal limitations -- she has a pleasant enough voice but it's not musically specific enough to match the depth of her normal acting -- aren't as much of a problem as they would be in another role. Cruz, has a different problem. She's terrific in the film but for her big scene, the musicals best number, which she undersells. She's sensationally sexy in "A Call From the Vatican", don't get me wrong. But her adroit skill with comedy is partially lost in the musical performance (the lyrics to "Vatican" are hilarious and it's tough to hear them in Cruz's rendition). She's far far better in her non-singing scenes where she totally nails both the drama of Carla's desperation and the comedy of her guileless desire "I'll be waiting right here. With my legs open."

Marshall. If it sounds like I'm hopelessly contradictory about the quality of Nine, I am. The source material (both on stage and previously on film) is strong and Marshall's wise decisions are frustratingly intermingled with his poor ones (and the latter will make some people justifiably cuh-razy). Chief among the triumphs is his choice of cinematographer. Dion Beebe does phenomenal work and its a marked improvement on his similarly premised work on Chicago. Marshall also stages the musical numbers well (unobscured by eager film editing, I'm guessing they'd be great on stage). "Be Italian", while arguably too similar to Chicago's "Cell Block Tango", is still thrilling to watch and ferociously performed by Fergie.

Even while I was enjoying the numbers I found myself still resenting Marshall's status as THE go to man for film musicals, especially since he doesn't seem to fully trust the form. He employs, again, the overly literal notion/gimmick that musical numbers must take place in the imagination because people don't sing in real life. Note to everyone: If people don't like to watch people burst into song, they probably aren't going to go to musicals. People who go to musicals WANT to see people burst into song. It's not a realist film genre.

The only huge disappointment in terms of a "number" is Judi Dench's "Folies Bergeres". It's so busy visually that it runs into the same problem as Chicago's "Razzle Dazzle" number: so many bright competing colors combined with too much movement and it all becomes a muddy mess. And it goes on forever.

But again for every couple of failures, a triumph: the finale is perfect. And don't you have to end well? Marshall closes the movie with an inspired, beautifully simple fusion of stage trope and literal movie-making. The finale is both a curtain call and a new beginning and I left the movie theater humming Nine's 'lalalalalas'.

You should always leave a musical humming.

Grade: B

If you must know it's like... Marion: A, Penélope: A (but for "A Call From the Vatican" which is a B), The original score: A-, the two new big songs: B+ and D, Nicole: B+, Judi: B+ (but for "Folies Bergeres" a C), Fergie: B (but please note: this is not an acting role), Daniel Day-Lewis: B-, Sophia Loren: exempt from grading. She's only there because they have to do something authentic for Italia!. Kate Hudson: C , Rob Marshall: C+