On DVD: When a Movie Fails to Become a Movie, Is It Art?

Rob Marshall's newest old-school Broadway musical reconstitution, Nine, got humdingered by critics when it briefly splashed into theaters last year. Audiences apparently felt the same way, because they ignored it, and so just when you're thinking Daniel Day Lewis can't pick his nose without getting Oscar-nominated, the year's biggest musical came and went in a fog of shame.

You'd probably loathe Nine, too, if you rented it now on DVD and expected a lavish, expert, star-studded musical, the traditional kind that fans of the 1982 Broadway show still sing hosannas about. (I still remember the, um, tempting TV commercials for the show, featuring a kittenish Anita Morris in a see-through body suit). But what if you expected a non-movie? Because that's what it is -- and it shouldn't be a surprise, derived as it is from Federico Fellini's 8½ (1963), which is about how Fellini can't summon the focus or creative energy to actually make a movie. But then he makes one anyway.

Bob Fosse's All that Jazz (1979) and Woody Allen's Stardust Memories (1980) did the same thing in overtly Felliniesque ways, all of it probing the essence of the form's primary text, Chuck Jones's Duck Amuck (1953), which, you'll remember, chronicles Daffy Duck's descent into psychosis as the film around him fails to ever become a "film," and in fact tries to kill him.

The idea hit the mud with Peter Greenaway's 8½ Women (2000) -- which makes Marshall's boondoggle look like, well, Fellini -- and passes through the stratosphere again with Spike Jonze and Charlie Kaufman's Adaptation (2002), which fails to "become" even as it succeeds, and then morphs into exactly the kind of movie its screenwriter didn't want to make.

In the process of expressing their various failures to make a movie, Fellini and most of the others also managed (almost coincidentally) to make traditionally enthralling and hilarious movies as well. Not Marshall -- his dedication to his material's self-destructing Duck Amuck-ness is pure as the driven snow. In other words, what was considered by most critics to be Marshall's crash-&-burn failure to make an orthodox movie might've instead been his uncorrupted focus on Fellini's mission: to chronicle creative inertia. In a way, Marshall succeeded where Fellini failed. If you're making a film about the agonies of artistic block, shouldn't your film be ruinous and unsatisfying in every way?

Mind you, it's not a hand job to sit through -- the original musical (by Arthur M. Kopit and Maury Yestin) is so lumbering and uninventive it may well have "succeeded" at failing on stage to the same outrageous degree it does on screen. Sure, Stacy Ferguson (the Black Eyed Peas' Fergie) vamps her number through the skylight, and Oscar-winner Marion Cotillard delivers her song like a stork delivering its last baby of the year. As welcome though they are, the occasional juicy musical moments almost wreck Marshall's master plan. But not quite.