Nine
Rob Marshall | USA | 2009
118 min

Nine is a cinematic burlesque show. It stumbles into the spotlight as a treatise on art and cinema and the difficulty of filmmaking, but is really nothing more than an awful excuse to bring together on the big screen one named actor and a bunch of famed beauties. Based on a stage musical, itself based on Federico Fellini’s seminal 8 ½, Nine suffers from a grim setting, unmemorable songs, a wayward script, but mostly due to the miscasting of Daniel Day Lewis in the lead role. 

As a director suffering from mental block, Guido Contini’s professional stagnation is indistinguishable from other dime-a-dozen interpretations we’ve seen in movies before — for effective examples  see either Shakespeare in Love or even last years wonderful Synedoche New York. Instead of being light or brisk, the film is heavy on self-indulgence turning into a showy, bloated pap for Guido. Daniel Day Lewis brings his usual caged intensity to what is essentially, at its heart, a song and dance film about a man reminiscing about his life and his various muses (mother, lover, wife, etc). The seriousness renders the film needlessly weighty, without adding to its effectiveness, while being completely in visual contrast to the risqué clothing and debauchery on display. Director Rob Marshall does his best to inject the same energy that was well-used in his adaptation of Chicago, but all the rich production values cannot save a film from feeling weary.

When the film isn’t being a lingerie commercial — the various stars/divas/botox queens gyrate, strut or spank themselves in their lacey negligee — it gets lost in trying to be dramatic or relevant with its flashy editing and colourful mélange, feeling more like a Pussycat Dolls vintage music video. Fellini’s 8 ½ aimless yet relevant as it was (I am not an admirer of it), made use of the same setting to be both serious and funny, letting its dreaminess allow us to accept it as a man’s mental imagery. Here the imagery is forced, meant to awe us, such as the futile end where all of the stars gather on stage: for what, a final goodbye? I could only wish that the taking of bows had come much earlier.