What makes Rob Marshall’s Nine so peculiarly bad is its sheer self-congratulation. We’re incessantly told how important, how fascinating the director Guido Contini must be, and we as viewers are expected to take this on faith, but never once does Guido (Daniel Day-Lewis) do or say anything even remotely intriguing. The movie has no real subject; it’s proudly about nothing. Not the arid nothingness of a Van Sant movie, but a boring sort of Condé Nast nothingness. If the real-life Federico Fellini had been as dull and as mopey as his fictional counterpart Contini, no one would have ever staged a Broadway musical [loosely] inspired by the autobiographical 8-1/2 in the first place, which means we could have been spared this present debacle that masquerades as entertainment.
Day-Lewis gamely tries to personify a song-and-dance man, yet his integrity as a performer works against him in a Rob Marshall movie. When Day-Lewis, in his first solo number, climbs the spiraling soundstage staircase that rises into the dark, it ought to be an iconic moment, but there’s magic neither in Marshall’s airless staging nor in his unimaginative camera work.
But back to that nothingness: It’s vitally important to Nine, because that’s all there is.
Posted in 2009, Film Tagged: Daniel Day-Lewis, Federico Fellini, Judi Dench, Kate Hudson, Marion Cotillard, musicals, Pedro Almodóvar, Penelope Cruz, Rob Marshall, Sophia Loren
