Musical version of Fellini's 8½ is ½ too much
by Jim Ridley
What The Simpsons' Oh, Streetcar! did to Tennessee Williams ("You're a dame, and I'm a fella" / "Stanley, stop or I'll tell Stella!"), Maury Yeston's musical travesty Nine does to Federico Fellini—only you'd never catch Moe the bartender cavorting like poor never-say-die Kate Hudson through a go-go number that rhymes "prism" with "Italian neo-realism." (I'd give you the exact quote, except I was prying gum off the seat to stuff my ears.) Nine is a holdover from the Broadway musical's 1980s wilderness years, and its bad ideas only start with rounding upward the playful title of Fellini's 1963 artist's-block fantasia 8½ (its place in his filmography at the time). The ½ chipped in by composer-lyricist Yeston and Chicago director/choreographer Rob Marshall proves more than enough to turn Fellini's sustained flight of imagination into a glitzy spectacle that would be the pride of any second-tier casino.
What's missing from the movie is the spark of personal obsession. Directors as diverse as Woody Allen, goremeister Lucio Fulci and Paul Mazursky (who went so far as to cast Fellini in his 1970 homage Alex in Wonderland) have made variations on 8½; you could even call Bob Fosse's 1979 confessional All That Jazz (shot with Fellini's cinematographer) something of a movie-musical facsimile. But in each case, the directors' true subjects were their own lives, their own films: why would you make a movie about someone else's creative turmoil? The best Nine can offer is pastiche: black-and-white recreations of la dolce vita, color recreations of splashy 1960s chic and runway shows, tinny echoes of the original source.
The movie's reworked book (credited to the high-powered team of Michael Tolkin and the late Anthony Minghella) retains the essential premise of Fellini's film, following the director's surrogate Guido (Daniel Day Lewis) through a surreal spa getaway as he tries to escape creative frustration, romantic entanglements and the paralysis that comes from being able to make anything. In Guido, the indefatigable ladies' man Day Lewis gets to use a little of the sensualist's delight he brought to the movie version of The Unbearable Lightness of Being, and he's lithe and game as a hoofer. Or at least I think he is: As with Richard Gere in Chicago, Marshall shoots his musical numbers with such overreliance on backlighting and fragmentary cutting that you often suspect you're watching a double whether you are or not.
The actor all but cedes the movie to his various leading ladies, whose roles amount to a catwalk parade of diva turns. Regrettably, they're all at the mercy of Yeston's unmemorable songs, and you're always aware how much talent they're expending on their inadequate tunes. It's a shame that when Judi Dench, as Guido's loyal costumer, gets a chance to show her zest for musical comedy on screen, she has to waste it on the elephantine "Folies Bergere" number. The movie treats its actresses as expensive Vegas showgirls, with brassy arrangements to match, and their impression is pretty much linked to how much they're willing to put out.
Thus Nicole Kidman, serene and sublimely jaded as a Claudia Cardinale/Anita Ekberg figure, gets less fanfare on screen than special guest prostitute Fergie, who lashes her lovely lady lumps through the movie's purported showstopper "Be Italian." As Guido's spitfire mistress, Penelope Cruz gets the flashiest part and shows some of the impudent sizzle she's never quite mustered in her Hollywood films—although Marion Cotillard, sidelined for much of the movie as Guido's long-suffering Giulietta Masina-esque wife, gives off a stronger erotic charge in her climactic kiss-off number.
Rob Marshall is a real curiosity as a movie-musical director. He doesn't seem to trust the bedrock convention upon which musicals are founded, that people simply open their mouths and express themselves through song. As in Chicago, he employs a lot of strenuous cutting and glaring stylization to draw a needless distinction between "real life" and the musical numbers. Which makes him an odd choice to direct a movie derived from 8½, which glides so effortlessly from reality to fantasy. When The Belcourt screens the Fellini original the first week of January, check it out—if only to see how the addition of a single measly ½ can all but ruin a whole movie.
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