Rob Marshall (2009)
The sine qua non for this material is that there’s a vital connection between the movie unfolding before us and the character of its protagonist, the star film auteur Guido. Unless Guido intrigues us as a cinema artist, unless we experience the film we’re watching as an expression of his art, the concept is seriously depleted. Because Fellini is such a famous director and 8½ has become a classic, it’s nowadays hard for audiences coming to it for the first time (I didn’t see it until 2004) not to be conscious of who made it but I guess there will be plenty of people watching Nine who know little or nothing of its lineage[1] – I kept trying to imagine how they would see it, and what they would see in it, if they didn’t connect it with 8½. Without the musical numbers (see below), Nine amounts to little more than an expensive-looking, florid marital melodrama with a period (mid-1960s) setting. Its protagonist is a handsome, self-centred philanderer (he’s a world famous director but we gather that his recent pictures haven’t been a success and there’s no evidence of his film-making talent). Anyone who knows and likes 8½ and can’t put it out of their mind is likely to find Nine an aberration. In Fellini’s film the women in Guido Anselmi’s life – his wife, his mistress, his muse et al – are central to his artistic and personal obsessions and dilemmas but they’re not the whole story: Guido’s relationship with the Catholic church, for example, is important too. The screenplay for Nine, by Michael Tolkin and Anthony Minghella (to whose memory the film is dedicated), retains Guido’s meeting with a cardinal but the sequence is perfunctory. Nine is about a filmmaker and about making, and not making, a film; yet Guido (his surname here is Contini) imagines each one of his women performing on a stage. If there’s a good reason for this, beyond the fact that the immediate source is a stage musical and a convenient option, it’s not obvious.
The terrible songs by Maury Yeston (most of them in the stage show apparently) sound like either Whose Line Is It Anyway? improvisations or plagiarism. They exude the synthetic Italianism of the piece: one is called ‘Be Italian’ (the tune is a pinch from ‘Reviewing the Situation’ from Oliver!), another ‘Cinema Italiano’. Nearly every one of these songs is designed as a ‘showstopper’ – some from the word go, others working up to a knock-‘em-dead finale. It’s no surprise that, except for ‘My Husband Makes Movies’, sung by Guido’s wife Luisa when she joins her husband’s party at a restaurant, they all end up sounding the same. ‘My Husband Makes Movies’ is one of the few effective bits in the picture just because its tone and staging are so different from the rest. Nino Rota’s score for 8½ is so memorable and the film contains sequences of such superb theatricality that the music in Nine sometimes seems not only bad but tautologous – for example, when the beach dance by Saraghina (Fergie) segues into a stage number. One of the few smart decisions which Rob Marshall makes is to end the film with a graceful, quiet image – the little boy who has played the child Guido sits on the adult Guido’s knee as they’re hoisted into position to oversee the action on set. At least Marshall doesn’t try to emulate the great, absurd curtain call dance in 8½.
The Fellini film, for all its extravagance and phantasmagoria, makes sense because it’s the emanation of a distinct film-making sensibility; one of its chief pleasures is the partnership between Fellini and Marcello Mastroianni, who plays Fellini’s alter ego Guido, and whose subtlety and humanity tone down the egocentric masochism of the material. Daniel Day-Lewis, who plays Guido here, might also have done great things in a film made by an artist; as it is, he’s in a Rob Marshall picture. Day-Lewis has a precision of expression and gesture that make him continually absorbing to watch but Marshall’s direction is so impersonal and mechanical that there’s nothing for his star to play off. Day-Lewis seems ready to deliver but you keep waiting for his performance to ignite and it never does. And although he draws the camera, he doesn’t engage your sympathy – a big difference from Mastroianni, and one which can’t so easily be blamed on the director. Marshall has, however, either allowed or encouraged Day-Lewis to speak in what Anthony Lane calls in his New Yorker review a ‘like a-theese’ Italian accent. There’s some kind of logic to this: with French, Italian and Spanish co-stars and an Australian playing a Scandinavian (or German?) star, it means that most of the main characters are talking in accented English. But the logic isn’t rigorously observed – Judi Dench, playing a Frenchwoman, speaks without continental inflections.
Dench plays Guido’s costume designer, Lilli La Fleur, and her phenomenal, bricks-out-of-straw gift for creating character is a godsend: Lilli is both acerbically pragmatic and caring – you believe in her often exasperated loyalty to Guido, in her feelings divided between admiration and concern for him and sympathy for the raw deal his wife gets. Kate Hudson, as an American fashion correspondent called Stephanie Necrophuros, is also vivid and convincing: there’s a desperate edge to Stephanie’s eager ingratiation. Hudson is poorly rewarded: some of the shots of her thighs and backside are borderline prurient and she has to sing ‘Cinema Italiano’ (although Dench’s number ‘Folies Bergères’ is even worse). Claudia Jenssen, Guido’s ideal woman on screen, is an artificial star construct and Nicole Kidman is much more effective in this (Moulin Rouge!) kind of role than when she’s meant to be a real human being. Penelope Cruz is rather too obviously cast as Guido’s mistress Carla Albanese (and way less entertaining than Sandra Milo in the corresponding part in 8½) but Marion Cotillard is compelling as Luisa. The wronged wife routine is a routine but Cotillard is controlled and expressive, and has an interiority which is refreshingly different from much of what’s going on around her (although the forced emotionality of her second number – not Cotillard’s fault – rather takes the edge off what she does elsewhere in the film). As Guido’s mother, Sophia Loren can rarely, in the course of a cinema career of nearly sixty years, have needed her core of good humour as much as she does here.
Dion Beebe is the director of photography as he was for Chicago; the editors are different – Claire Simpson and Wyatt Smith instead of Martin Walsh – but the editing of the musical numbers is the same. It’s the kind of pyrotechnical cutting that’s often described as ‘brilliant’ because it so draws attention to itself but it destroys whatever rhythm the singing and dancing might otherwise have. (There’s a good deal less to destroy here than in Chicago.) Another pleasure of 8½ is that it’s an apparently autobiographical piece about artist’s block which demonstrates that its creator is either a stranger to the syndrome or has got the better of it. The only sense in which the Hollywood director of Nine connects with the Cinecittà filmmaker-within-the-film is that neither of them seems able to make a decent picture.
30 December 2009
[1] According to Wikipedia: ‘Nine is a 2009 musical-romantic film …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’.
