If Nine is a disaster - and it surely is one, the very definition of "ill-conceived" - it is a fascinating, multilayered disaster, wrong in so many ways, and on so many levels, that figuring out just where it goes wrong is almost diverting enough to compel a full viewing. If you love musicals, if you love cinematic self referencing and deconstruction... you just might love watching Nine assemble all the elements in the most surely messed-up way possible. This doesn't just happen - you have to work at it.
Dating back to Broadway's darkest days - that period in the early eighties when almost no new shows were produced, and those that were had serious flaws - Nine (1982) was, I realized, emblematic of one of Broadway's real struggles: a dearth of male performers strong enough to carry the lead role in a musical, while a generation of multiple talented actresses were more than able to hold up their end. Nine is an odd show, top heavy with showy female roles, none large enough - or mostly fleshed out enough - to be a really satisfying lead, centered around a cipher-like, barely there male.
You could make a similar case for other shows of that period - Chicago and A Chorus Line leap to mind as similarly constructed, Dreamgirls sidesteps the issue by essentially being an ensemble effort - which may explain the odd period of musical film adaptation we're in: the problems these shows bring to the table are in their bones, their very structures... and thus are very hard to undo.
Still, it's hard to ignore that the central problem in Nine is its male role and its male lead: Daniel Day-Lewis is utterly miscast in a difficult role as Guido, the self centered, successful, melodramatic film director struggling to put together his next film. The role is thankless, yet essential: if we as an audience can't sympathize or identify with Guido's travails, the show lacks an emotional center... and Day-Lewis provides exactly that vacuum at the center of these proceedings. It's a hammy, unsubtle (everything screams ACTING in him) performance with almost no feel for what musical theater requires. That's especially true of what's supposed to pass for dancing from Day-Lewis, which mostly tends towards a vertical version of the Horizontal Samba.
It doesn't help that Guido - surely one of the most rampantly heterosexual characters ever created for a musical - has troubles all centered around the women in his life, or that his conception of them isn't much beyond the Catholic trilogy: Virgin, Madonna, Whore. Nearly every woman in this exercise is, at some point, lashed into some sort of lacy contraption, breasts pushed forward and skyward, working stockings and garters to the same smutty point. I can't begin to describe how cruelly unfortunate this is to a dignified, decent actress like Judi Dench, or how much this robs Penelope Cruz of her usual ability to be natural and subtly sexy. Cruz's number (A Call From The Vatican) is especially tawdry, though it gets topped, in sheer (and I do mean see through) excess by Fergie's "Be Italian!"
The Cruz-Dench-Fergie triumvirate of numbers (Dench's is Folies Bergere) are the first three, and their excesses and failings tend to underline another problem with Nine: as a musical it suffers from a weak, rough score. Maury Yeston is neither Kander, nor Ebb, and Nine tends to reveal his weaknesses: musically underdeveloped, full of clunky lyrics, there are perhaps two fully fleshed out songs in Nine, and a lot of not-quite songs that seem incomplete. Nine has always been at the mercy of its female performers - if they're strong enough to put the material over... then it kind of works. If they can't, things kind of grind to a halt. Cruz can't. Dench does her level best, but the material fails her. Fergie performs the hell out of her song... but there's just not much there.
Blessed with two fairly poignant numbers, Marion Cotillard probably fares best, in no small measure because she possesses the astonishing gift of being able to act while singing. That's rare enough, but Cotillard, who seems at first to be a pale image of her usual screen presence, reveals her character, Luisa, by degrees, each slightly more wrenching than the last. I'm not sure many actresses could make as much out of "My Husband Makes Movies" as she does, or turn her final number "Take It All" into a confrontational striptease where watching her bare all is your problem, not hers.
Nicole Kidman, meanwhile, floats through the proceedings so fluidly that when she finally opens her mouth and performs, it is almost amazing to fine her so assured, but she shows pretty firmly that Moulin Rouge was no fluke, and more than anyone she finds an emotional center to the material (and perhaps as pointedly, is about the only performer to really connect with Day-Lewis).
The real revelation, though, is Kate Hudson, whose number, Cinema Italiano is about the best thing here. Less a musical number than Vogue photo shoot done as a music video, Hudson is about as breezy and relaxed as I've ever seen her, and for once - even in a role that her mother could have done twenty years ago - she manages to escape the shadow of Goldie Hawn that seems to surround a good bit of her work.
It's in these ligter, breezier, glitzier moments - when Hudson shimmies in her white and silver go-go getup, or when Kidman and Day-Lewis do a pure movie star run in a convertible from a pack of paparazzi - that Nine seems to almost find itself. Unfortunately, Rob Marshall seems to have no idea how to do this over the whole film, and, sadly, he seems haunted by ghosts of Chicago. There's too much Cell Block Tango in Fergie's "Be Italian", too much Queen Latifah and Richard Gere in "Folies Bergere". Marshall seems to want to prove that Nine is serious, thinking person's musical stuff... and it's not. It's a fairly obvious tale of self centered hedonist being brought up short by reality and forced to abandon fantasy, and the film gets weighed down in portentousness. Perhaps Fellini himself could have managed this balancing act (though that's not my impression of 8 1/2), but Nine needs more sizzle and less sozzle; Hollywood rarely can look at itself with a clear eye, never mind looking clearly at the racy, hepped up feel of mod sixties Italia. To the extent anyone's made a womanizing musical director monster into a sympathetic character... it's Bob Fosse. And All That Jazz is world's away from anything being attempted in Nine.
In the end, the real failure of Nine is seeing women through the prism of naughty Catholic schoolboy fantasy - beyond the offensive, obvious sexism, there's the endless sense that there's little more to say to all of what''s here than "oh, grow up" (Which, by the way, pretty much sums up Sophia Loren's final speech as the ghost of his mother). In a show so dominated by the work of women, trying to salvage Nine would have to, at base, abandon the framework of the child-man at its center. But without him... why bother? That's the question that hangs over Nine, and probably always has... the failure of the film is not even realizing that the question is there, but that's hard to see when you're spending so much time on your knees.
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