In my review of Rob Marshall’s Memoirs of a Geisha, I stated that the director had all the subtly of the Las Vegas Strip. What was meant as a disparaging condemnation for that film is actually a positive asset for his latest undertaking. When it comes to big, show-stopping musicals like Nine, I frankly want someone who directs with unrestrained, exaggerated embellishment. That said, I enjoyed Nine on a superficial level only, which is to say I enjoyed its slick veneer and its razzle-dazzle façade, but beauty is indeed only skin deep in this emotionally vacant, gaudy mess of a film.

Nine, based on the Tony award-winning Broadway production, is itself based on Federico Fellini’s 8½, a film about a prominent, narcissistic Italian film director’s debilitating lack of inspiration and anxiety over failing as an artist. Guido Contini has reached his 40th birthday (and his eighth film) and finds himself in a creative and existential rut. Though he claims to have a new script ready and has mobilized a small army to begin shooting it, the truth is that he cannot conceive of a single idea. Fleeing Rome, he hides out at a seaside spa resort praying his creative blockage will end. But as his adoring public, anxious producers and low-class paramours discover his whereabouts, Guido realizes there is nowhere he can run that will help ease his artistic paralysis.

Nine, like 8 ½, is awash in beautiful, sexy women, all in some way or another caught in Guido’s (Daniel Day-Lewis) orbit. There is his demure wife Luisa (Marion Cotillard), the ghostly presence of his late mother (Sophia Loren), his attention-starved mistress (Penelope Cruz), his leading lady (Nicole Kidman), his costume designer/confessor (Judi Dench), an American reporter for Vogue (Kate Hudson) who is hungry for more than just Guido’s story, and the Saraghina (The Black Eyed Peas’ Fergie), Fellini’s village prostitute and archetypical tutor in all things sexual.

Nine, it has to be said, comes packaged with an impressive number of actors (almost none of whom are Italian — American, Irish, British, Spanish, Australian, etc.) who’ve had the pleasure of fraternizing with Oscar, though they deliver only serviceable performances here. Day-Lewis blessedly forgoes Italian caricatures, but he never quite masters a convincing accent. Kidman, meant to evoke images of Anita Ekberg — avec fountain, sans kitten — is given next to no lines. Cruz delivers a scorching, fully clothed striptease that may radiate the only heat you feel throughout the entire film. Cotillard alone gives a performance that cuts through the orgasmic pageantry to resemble anything remotely human.

8 ½ rarely verbalized Guido’s immobilized imagination; it visualized it through a series of surreal, stylized dreams. As Guido’s inner world becomes indistinguishable from his objective world, Nine tries to do the same thing, revealing his interiority through extravagant, garish musical numbers. However, in giving Guido’s metaphysical dread words, the images are robbed of their power, flaccid reminders of what we should be shown and not told. The songs, hyper-stylized numbers that, for the most part, stomp and shove their way around the same soundstage, are shot and choreographed for maximum effect, but you’ll likely find it difficult to recall any song after you leave the theater other than the belted, growled ballad “Be Italian.” This despite the fact that Nine is all songs and no story, a vulgar artistic endeavor that adds nothing whatsoever to the classic film on which it is based.

© Copyright 2009 Brandon Fibbs. All rights reserved.