"Nine"

Believe me, no one was more sur­prised than myself not to have hated this movie. Consider what it does­n’t have going for it. Its dir­ect­or, Rob Marshall, was behind two pic­tures I found abso­lutely awful: the puerile, gig­glingly amor­al, fake-cynical, know-something-ish “razzle dazzle” fest Chicago, and the bloated, over­reach­ing snooze­fest Memoirs of a Geisha. This is the guy who’s going to film a music­al based on Fellini’s 8 1/2, then. I become a less and less reli­gious man about such mat­ters year after year; non­ethe­less, with this com­pon­ent the sul­phur­ous stench of close-to-the-source-of-all-evil blas­phemy def­in­itely attached itself to this pro­ject. Also, its cast con­tains the human rep­res­ent­at­ive of all that is filthily vul­gar and mediocre on this earth. No, not Ricky Tognazzi, you dolt. Fergie, the incon­tin­ent female mem­ber of that hippity-hop combo Bush’s Barbecue Beans, or whatever the hell they’re called. Her. (And by the way, get off my lawn.)

So there was that, and likely more, but you get the idea. So I was indeed kind of taken aback to find myself not only not seeth­ing with hatred watch­ing an early screen­ing of the pic­ture, but actu­ally mostly enjoy­ing myself. 

It cer­tainly helps that, for what would appear to be the very first time, Marshall under­stands his place, and approaches both of the film’s source mater­i­als (the stage play and the Fellini film) from a per­spect­ive you would­n’t want to call mod­est, but is at least reas­on­able. Which is to say, Nine nev­er tries to be a Fellini film, or even emu­late a Fellini film. Rather, it plays out as a homage, not only to Fellini but to modes of exist­ence and cul­ture that we attach, for bet­ter or worse, to the peri­od in the early ’60s or there­abouts wherein the eth­os of a hand­ful of Fellini films defined “la dolce vita.” A lot of the time Nine looks like an expens­ive fash­ion magazine photo lay­out inspired by Fellini. And I don’t think that’s a bad thing in and of itself. (And there are quite a few people who’ll insist that a good deal of actu­al Fellini, start­ing with Juliet of the Spirits, looks like a Fellini-inspired fash­ion lay­out. But that’s beside the point here.)

In any event, the breez­i­er per­spect­ive more or less dis­posed of the sac­ri­lege con­cern right off the bat. Another salut­ary aspect of the film is its briskness—it’s barely an hour and fifty minutes long. (I know, that was true of Chicago, too. But Chicago felt like forever. Although I admit that could have had some­thing to do with the fact that I had to sit with my thumb up my ass in the screen­ing room for forty damn minutes while the pub­li­cists duti­fully waited for the one oth­er attendee, Bonnie “I Fought The Law” Fuller, to show up.) Screenwriters Michael Tolkin and the late Anthony Minghella are both sharp guys, and I don’t know to what extent they altern­ated between the stage play’s book and 8 1/2 itself in adapt­ing the thing, but they came up with a nice mod­u­lar struc­ture in which dir­ect­or Guido’s inab­il­ity to con­ceive his next pic­ture is a kind of frame story with­in which his rela­tion­ships with vari­ous oth­er char­ac­ters, mostly women of course, are explored in dis­crete scenes. Tying it all togeth­er visu­ally is the gigant­ic set he’s con­struc­ted on Cinecitta, which he has­n’t the faintest idea of what to do with.   And so these vari­ous women…Guido’s fever­ish mis­tress (Penelope Cruz), long-suffering wife (Marion Cotillard), no-nonsense cos­tume design­er (Dame Judi Dench), quasi-groupie “journ­al­ist” (Kate Hudson), cine­mat­ic muse (Nicole Kidman), fondly-recalled-prostitute-from-misspent youth (Fergie), and, finally, Guido’s moth­er (Sophia Loren!) all turn up, both as they are and as they exist in Guido’s ima­gin­a­tion. And they do their all-singing, all-dancing num­bers, wham, and then step aside to embroid­er the film’s peri­phery until the cli­max pulls everything togeth­er. It’s quite effi­cient and ener­get­ic and makes you not mind quite so much that the songs them­selves are pretty for­get­table if not some­times worse. (Hudson’s num­ber, a written-for-the-film ditty about Guido’s “Cinema Italiano,” is par­tic­u­larly cringe worthy, but the fact that it’s sung by a char­ac­ter who actu­ally would come up with some­thing so pre­cisely dumb helps it work.)

As for the women, Cruz is very hot and very funny, Cotillard attract­ive and mildly affect­ing (although it took me about 20 minutes to real­ize she was­n’t Rachel Weisz),   Dench reli­ably droll, Hudson maybe a little too con­vin­cing as an unat­tract­ive char­ac­ter in an attract­ive pack­age. It goes without say­ing that Kidman’s no Claudia Cardinale, and while she’s both game and well-lit, she really was the only woman who came off as kind of a dud. Fergie is able to split the dif­fer­ence between earth moth­er (or should that be swamp thing?) and skink in her brief turn, and Sophia Loren is Sophia Loren. As for Daniel Day Lewis’ Guido, well, he’s no Daniel Plainview or Bill the Butcher. It’s inter­est­ing to watch this act­ing vir­tu­oso man­age what had to have been his least demand­ing role he’s had since, oh, I don’t know, Stars and Bars (which should­n’t be taken as a knock on Stars and Bars, by the way). There’s a cer­tain know­ing irony to the work here, an acknow­ledge­ment that he’s on some­thing of a well-paying bus­man’s hol­i­day. When his Guido has his sunglasses on and he nods his head and makes that half-grimace/half-grin, there’s this acknow­ledge­ment that he knows that you know that they know that you know he’s play­ing you/them and so on. It’s fun.

And then, of course, there is, as the illus­tra­tions here testi­fy, what SCTV’s Edith Prickley would call the “chicks in their under­wear” factor, and I have to admit, for this par­tic­u­lar view­er it worked a treat. On anoth­er ran­dom note, I was amused that Kate Hudson’s rather vile “journ­al­ist” is intro­duced as a writer for Vogue. Between her and Iron Man’s Christine Everhart (Leslie Bibb), who was sup­poesdly from Vanity Fair, you’d think Hollywood was under the impres­sion that all the edit­or­i­al depart­ments at Condé Nast were staffed exclus­ively by attract­ive blondes of shaky mor­al char­ac­ter who think noth­ing of sleep­ing with their pro­file sub­jects. You’d think they’d nev­er got­ten a load of James Wolcott, or Christopher Hitchens. I know for a fact they know what John Connolly looks like! And as a mat­ter of fact, the most notori­ous writer-sleeping-with-a-profile sub­ject anec­dote I know of did­n’t even occur at a Condé Nast pub­lic­a­tion, but rather at…I can say no more. So well-known is this tale among media insiders that I assumed it had gone pub­lic long ago, but a Google search dis­ab­used me of that notion. Sorry, inquir­ing minds. Anyway, if I was Si Newhouse I’d be a little peeved.

Also incid­ent­ally, I see that my own take on the film runs dir­ectly counter to that of David Thomson, whose Guardian review of it is a half-eulogy for his friend Minghella, and who calls Nine “very poignant [and] fra­gile,” a “very mov­ing film,” and then sniffs (it would­n’t be a Thomson review if he did­n’t sniff), “I’m not sure if the pub­lic will take it to their hearts.” I’m sorry that Thomson lost a friend, but as far as this film is con­cerned, I’d really like to know what he was smoking.