115 minutes
In theaters December 25, 2009
Rating: PG-13, Musical
In the movies, if you add music to 8-1/2, you get Nine.
That may not compute, but it explains why some of us prefer movies to math.
Nine -- based on the Tony Award-winning Broadway musical that was based on an Italian play that was itself based on director Federico Fellini's influential 1963 film classic, 8-1/2 -- is a musical exploration of the creative process with a decidedly Italian accent.
Guido Contini, played by Daniel Day-Lewis (played under another name by Marcello Mastroianni on screen and on stage by Raul Julia and then Antonio Banderas), has an acute case of director's block. In 1965 Rome, the internationally famous and intensely revered Italian maestro is scheduled to make his ninth movie -- hence the title -- but all he's got is a title: the imposing and intimidating Italia.
Because he's in the middle of a midlife crisis -- a dizzying jumble of confusion, regret, guilt, longing, frustration, and fatigue-- and coming off two box-office flops, he's unable to reconcile his personal and professional lives. Daydreams, hallucinations, and memories distract and seduce him. This renders his creativity frozen: he's constitutionally unable to come up with anything in the way of ideas or specifics about the new film to satisfy his eager fans, his nervous producers, his dependent colleagues, the hounding press, or the curious public.
His obsessive thoughts run to seven important women in his life: his long-suffering wife (Marion Cotillard), his demanding mistress (Penelope Cruz), his adoring mother (Sophia Loren), his knowing costume designer (Judi Dench), his actress muse (Nicole Kidman), a seductive reporter (Kate Hudson), and the dancing hooker who sparked his sexual coming-of-age (Fergie of the Black Eyed Peas).
Appropriately circus-like -- as were most of Fellini's films -- Nine teems with life, even if it doesn't always flow smoothly. Director Rob Marshall (Memoirs of a Geisha), working from an adapted screenplay by Michael Tolkin and the late Anthony Minghella based on the musical by book writer Arthur Kopit and composer and lyricist Maury Weston, mixes color footage with black-and-white segments as he darts in and out of musical numbers and stages the film like a revue with dramatic scenes separating the musical numbers.
Smartly, he borrows a successful technique from his terrific, Oscar-winning Chicago and avoids the awkwardness of having to justify realistic characters suddenly breaking into song by staging the sparkling, masterfully edited musical numbers as alternate-reality fantasies, most of them emanating from inside the tortured mind of Contini.
Some of the performers are singers (Cotillard, Fergie, Kidman) and some are not (Day-Lewis, Cruz, Dench, Hudson, Loren), but all of them can act and thus sell a song. Each of them gets at least one solo (Fergie's "Be Italian" is an instant highlight), Day-Lewis is his usual astoundingly convincing self, and Cotillard and Cruz shine especially bright during their numbers.
The songs -- only eight of which have been retained from the stage show, with three new songs added for the film -- may not be as overwhelmingly winning or vividly memorable as we might hope for, but the lyrics are consistently interesting and there's plenty of Chicago-pegged razzle-dazzle on display throughout, even if the thoughtfully understated conclusion fails to satisfy our desire for a climactic, cathartic musical finale.
This is a well-crafted, glamourous, energetic, and enjoyable musical about movies, marriage, and the mind. We don't need a stitch in time to save Nine: it's time well spent.
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Source:XMB