Film Review: Nine (2009)
The Oscar-laden machinery known as the Weinstein Brothers is no longer the formidable force it once was. Since their unceremonious departure from Miramax and their subsequent attempts to rebuild at The Weinstein Company, their efforts to recapture the Academy Award glory of the 1990s and early 2000s have yielded decidedly mixed results. One might argue this decline stems from their stubborn adherence to copying once-successful formulas that have since grown stale. Nine—Rob Marshall's musical adaptation based on the 1973 Broadway show—serves as perhaps the most telling example of this creative bankruptcy.
Like Chicago before it, Nine draws from a successful stage musical. In this instance, the source material was itself derived from Federico Fellini's semi-autobiographical masterpiece 8½ (1963). The Broadway version, created by Arthur Kopit, Mario Fratti, and Michael Yeston, transplanted Fellini's introspective meditation on artistic crisis into the realm of song and dance. Marshall, whose choreographic background made him a natural fit for the genre—despite his rather less assured handling of Memoirs of a Geisha—returns here to more familiar territory. Yet some seven years after Chicago's Oscar triumph, the sense of déjà vu is inescapable. Marshall employs identical techniques: the intercutting of cabaret-style musical numbers with dramatic narrative, the same kinetic editing, the same fetishisation of smoke and mirrors.
These inevitable comparisons do Nine no favours. Where Chicago crackled with energy and wit, this film stumbles on almost every count. The musical numbers are notably inferior—particularly "Cinema Italiano," a cynically inserted track designed solely to secure an Original Song nomination. The characters, rather than being fully realised, collapse into parodic stereotypes. Most damning of all is the cast, which—with honourable exceptions—resembles a waxworks exhibition more than an ensemble of living performers. Nicole Kidman, her features increasingly immobilised by cosmetic intervention, delivers a performance that is as physically rigid as it is emotionally vacant.
Daniel Day-Lewis portrays Guido Contini, Fellini's cinematic alter ego transplanted to 1960s Italy. Celebrated as a genius, drowning in female attention, Contini faces a crisis that is simultaneously professional and personal: his marriage to the long-suffering Luisa (Marion Cotillard) is disintegrating, whilst his latest epic production stalls for want of a script he cannot bring himself to write. It is a premise rich with potential—creative paralysis, masculine vanity, the cost of artistic ambition—yet Marshall treats it all with a heavy hand, mistaking spectacle for substance.
For committed cinephiles, Nine offers occasional diversion in the form of visual references to Fellini's oeuvre, his celebrated leading ladies, and the milieu of Italian cinema's golden age. These Easter eggs provide brief moments of recognition that might raise a knowing smile. The general audience, however, will find little to sustain them. Where Fellini's original was genuinely anarchic and introspective, Marshall's adaptation is merely chaotic and hollow. The women in Guido's life—played by Penélope Cruz, Sophia Loren, Fergie, Kate Hudson, and the aforementioned Kidman—are afforded their individual musical showcases, yet these sequences feel disconnected from any coherent dramatic through-line, existing as set pieces rather than integrated expressions of character.
The fundamental problem lies in the translation from stage to screen, and from Fellini to Broadway to Hollywood. What began as a deeply personal exploration of artistic crisis has been processed through so many commercial filters that little authentic remains. The Weinsteins' desperation for another awards-season contender is palpable in every frame, from the prestige casting to the calculated insertion of Oscar-bait songs. The result is a film that feels not merely short at 112 minutes, but fundamentally insubstantial.
Rating: 3/10
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