According to Lilli (Judi Dench), the redoubtable costume designer and major domo to famed Italian director Guido Contini (Daniel Day-Lewis) in Rob Marshall's alternately stimulating and enervatingly dull adaptation of the Broadway musical Nine, directing is a highly overrated job. What it boils down to, she insists, is simply answering a series of questions with yes or no, then surrounding yourself with lackeys who will do your bidding. What's missing in this summation, of course, is the degree of difficulty often involved not in making a decision well but in making one at all; the courage -- or, as often, arrogant folly -- it takes to have conviction in your own ideas. In deciding to adapt Nine, itself a musical treatment of 8 ½, Federico Fellini's modernist masterpiece about creative paralysis, megalomania, and indecision, Marshall must have known he'd have a lot to answer for. And while many of his choices would seem beyond reproach -- Should we get giant female stars to shake and shimmy in their underpants? Yesss. Should Daniel Day-Lewis play their dashing ringmaster? Uh, ye-es! -- it's the first and most important question that never gets a satisfying reply: Ma perche? But...why?
On paper, or more aptly on a Weinstein Company spreadsheet, it all adds up: Marshall, an Oscar-winner (for best picture, but not director) for Chicago needed another project with flash; Nine has multiple parts for women that are loaded with cinematic potential and iconic freight--combined with Marshall having led a singing-and-dancing Catherine Zeta-Jones to an Oscar, the cast would be A-list actresses, all the way. And it's set in Italy! During the Mad Men years! But what may have worked as a stage-bound reimagining flounders not as spectacle but as story once it is returned to Fellini's domain. Ironically, what Nine resembles most, and most unhappily, given its intricate source material, is a vanity project. Times nine.
The whole point of 8 ½ is the inextricably, exquisitely personal nature of its story and themes. You could try to evaluate it on a strictly aesthetic, artistic grounds (and it would still be a classic), but doing so would violate the terms the film itself sets up. The bubble of context (which would include Fellini's adored public persona as well as that of star Marcello Mastroianni) on which its solid artistic reputation rests has become part of the film's package. 8 1/2 also achieves a certain timelessness because it is so unabashedly of its time -- so monstrously sexist, so in love with the cinema and the notion of director as god; it also has a self-awareness that saves it from dating the way other such cliché-ridden material might.
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.
Fergie plays La Saraghina, the beach-bound puttana whom Guido and his childhood friends would pay for advice and a little coochie-coo. One of the most memorable, haunting sequences from 8 ½, Marshall's redux succeeds largely on the strength, believe it or not, of Fergie's commitment; she'd loom large in my imagination as well. It is the best sense we get of both Guido's originally innocent but now highly problematic appetites -- even his formative experiences of love and sex were based in transaction -- and his conception of women as archetypes, as characters from which meaning must be extracted ("No wonder you've got no script," Guido is chastised, "You're too busy inventing your own life."). Fergie sells her big stage number, "Be Italian," like a pro, easily out-singing and out-emoting everyone else on the premises. The less said about Kate Hudson (a meretricious Vogue reporter), Sophia Loren (Guido's mother, imagined as a ghost), and Nicole Kidman (Guido's former leading lady), the better, although I will say that the extent to which the latter two simply offer up the idea of themselves (in Loren's case, always accompanied by a musical swell; "Loren's Theme"?) as sufficient cause for praise and admiration is alarming. Too soon, Kidman. Too soon.
Day-Lewis, almost as skinny as his knit silk ties, lacks the mitigating warmth of an actor like Marcello; his songs and his voice are also the weakest. Cotillard works it out in the only scene in the film that calls on the actors to pull from anything besides their diaphragms: confronting Guido after watching him make the same play with an auditioning actress that pierced her years ago, she seethes, "You think to create great art is to forgive yourself in public. [...] You're just an appetite, and if you stop being greedy you die." In an ensemble pictures where nothing quite hangs together, it's individual moments like these that audiences will find themselves wolfing down, grateful for some small substance to go with their dishy helping of style.