‘Nine’ nowhere close to a 10
Title-wise, the musical “Nine” registers half a digit higher than “81/2,” the Federico Fellini masterpiece that inspired the stage show that was the source for this new movie version.
On a scale of 1 to 10, though, “Nine” comes in somewhere around a 5, maybe 51/2.
Despite stars with enough Academy Awards hardware to start their own metal works, Rob Marshall’s musical ends up as an amiable but muddled music-video rehash of Fellini’s study of a filmmaker adrift in personal and creative turmoil.
Maybe the lofty cast – Oscar winners Daniel Day-Lewis, Nicole Kidman, Penelope Cruz and Judi Dench among them – raises expectations too high, as does Marshall’s best-picture Oscar for “Chicago.”
Day-Lewis stars as Guido Contini, a 1960s Italian filmmaker besieged by paparazzi and hangers-on as he prepares to start his latest movie – even though he hasn’t a clue what it’s going to be about.
We follow him through vibrant musical fantasies as he tries to work through his problems with help from the women in his life, past and present: his departed mom (Sophia Loren), his mistress (Cruz), a lusty fashion reporter (Kate Hudson), his costume designer (Dench), his screen muse (Kidman) and his wife (Marion Cotillard).
The women are stunning – Kidman a golden-goddess cousin to Anita Ekberg in Fellini’s “La Dolce Vita,” Loren a grand dame of class and dignity, Cruz sizzling as she gyrates through her bump-and-grind number in smoking hot lingerie.
Black Eyed Peas singer Fergie co-stars as a sexual symbol from Guido’s boyhood and captures old-school Italian sensuality that would have been at home in an early Fellini flick.
Though the musical numbers are grandly staged and delivered with earnest, the songs are not all that memorable.
Cotillard, who lip-synced through her Oscar-winning performance as Edith Piaf in “La Vie En Rose,” may have the weakest singing voice among the “Nine” stars. Still, her performance is a marvelous mix of patience, virtue, melancholy and simmering fury.
The simple, sad stares of a disillusioned woman, conveyed by a gifted actress, prove more powerful than all the ostentation and extravagance that Marshall and his production team can throw up on the screen.