Movie Review: Nine

LITTLE ROCK — No doubt there is an audience for Nine, a movie with a premise that sounds like a half-baked Saturday Night Live skit. Some people are starved for musicals and likely to embrace this poor clumsy tone-deaf show as this year’s razzle-dazzle bid for Oscar glory. If you loved Chicago and Showgirls, you’ll probably like Nine.

I didn’t, though I found it tolerable, and even interesting in spots. I’ll admit to having never seen a stage production of the Broadway hit Rob Marshall has adapted to the screen. But I do know a little about Fellini’s semi-autobiographical 8 1/2, the 1963 film that starred Marcello Mastroianni as the director’s surrogate and upon which the Broadway musical is based.

And while we’re not about reviewing 8 1/2 in this space, it’s probably useful to know that the Fellini film is a recursive, inward look at the problems of being an artist - particularly the problems of mining one’s emotional history and carting all that black personal stuff out into public. In a real sense 8 1/2 is a movie about its own making, a kind of tragic documentary of the hazards of living too long inside one’s head.

The idea of turning that most introspective of movies into an all-singing, all-dancing extravaganza with a cast rife with Oscar winners strikes me as perverse - and perhaps genius. (Which it was the first time someone tried it - what’s Bob Fosse’s All That Jazz if not a musical version of 8 1/2?)

Under the right conditions, this could be a gloriously vulgar affair, along the lines of the mythical network variety show I’ve often imagined Bob Dylan hosting in the ’70s. (In my head, he duets with Toni Tennille on“Love Will Keep Us Together” and banters bawdy-lite with Steve and Eydie.)

Unfortunately, the execution of actual movies never lives up to the bizarro spectacles we mount in our minds. Nine is more a derailment than an actual train wreck, more a bumpy annoyance than a compellingly bloody panoply.

Daniel Day-Lewis is game as the blocked Italian director whose mind serves as the stage for all this ado, but his accent makes him sound like the Count from Sesame Street (and yes, the Count is supposedly Translyvanian).

Dame Judi Dench fares worse as a French costumier. Stacy Ferguson, a.k.a. Fergie, is pretty terrific as an earthy prostitute, though her professional pipes serve to remind us how hard everyone else in thecast is trying. Nicole Kidman is suitably cerebral and icy as the Claudia Cardinale figure, but she really hasn’t got a lot to do.

Marion Cotillard fares well as the director’s long-suffering wife, and Penelope Cruz does a little dance with her bottom in the air. So the movie’s got that going for it. Along with Sophia Loren, the only real Italian in the featured cast.

And lets not forget Kate Hudson, who, while she isn’t so good in the dramatic scenes, has the second-best (after Fergie) musical number, a lightweight little intoxicant called “Cinema Italiano” that she delivers with a Nancy Sinatra purr:

I love the black and white/I love the play of light ...

It’s the only glimpse we catch of the weird and wonderful movie Marshall could have made.