In Theaters: Nine

No such luck for Daniel Day-Lewis, who looks oddly uncomfortable in his guido -- sorry, Guido -- get-up and speaks in a dodgy, Eastern-Euro-Italian accent as the maestro. In the post-opening sequence of Nine, he conjures a chorus line of the important women in his life, who strike pageant-like poses on the soundstage of Cinecitta, where he is daydreaming to fend off personal and professional responsibilities. To the uninitiated there is no causal connection between the opening scenes: Guido bluffs through a press conference about his next film because he's out of ideas, then imagines all of the vaginas he has known intimately lined up in a row. As the opening to a musical it also feels disastrous, like a finale that got lost and wandered to the top. Marshall seems torn between asserting Nine as a film on its own terms and leaning too heavily, as the random opener does, on knowledge only those intimate with 8 ½ would have.

What that opening actually amounts to is a sort of ersatz overture: each actress who appears -- Nicole Kidman, Marion Cotillard, Penelope Cruz, Dench, Sophia Loren, Kate Hudson, and Fergie -- will eventually have her own solo gig (Cotillard, who plays Guido's wife Luisa, has two) in which she delineates the function she serves in Guido's life, or his imagination. They are muses, essentially, and have little to do outside of their musical numbers, which Marshall occasionally, and awkwardly, integrates into the primary action. Mostly, however, they take place as discrete sequences on a Cinecitta stage; though distancing, this approach gives a measure of coherence to the numbers themselves that was missing from much of Chicago. A couple of the sequences, including Cruz's and Fergie's, are bona fide showstoppers: Cruz, playing Guido's mistress Carla, initially surfaces as pure, perfect figment, a man's fantasy of totally permeable, laughing, brainless sexuality. Her phone call interrupts Guido during some serious, Catholic business and we are transported to his imagining of Carla burlesquing vigorously to "A Call From the Vatican," a ridiculously kittenish number that Cruz throws her backside into with commendable gusto. It seems unfair that she can sing too.

Pages: 1 2 3