He’s a director. He’s haunted. He’s Italian. He’s Guido Contini (Daniel Day Lewis), and he’s creatively blocked – ten days before the start of a new movie whose script he hasn’t even begun. Beset by his producer, his crew, and the press, he turns to Lilli (Judi Dench), his costume designer, a sisterly ally with advice on everything from fabric selection to girlfriends. He envisions his Mama (Sophia Loren), who always reminds him of his strict Catholic upbringing…except Guido doesn’t want to hear it. And who can blame him? In the midst of a midlife crisis, all he can think about is women. He’s got Carla (Penelope Cruz) on the other end of the phone suggesting to him – in red lipstick, bustier and garters while performing a trapeze act from a swing – all the naughty things she plans to do to him. What a distraction! Penelope is, hands down, the sexiest thing known to man – or woman, for that matter. As a crazily seductive mistress, La Cruz is everything she was in Vicki Christina Barcelona times ten, and her jaw-dropping five-minute burlesque number brings the audience to its knees.
But enough about her. Because there’s also Claudia (Nicole Kidman), Guido’s lustrous movie star and muse, and let’s not forget Vogue reporter Stephanie (Kate Hudson) – though it’s easy to forget about her. Even though she adorably mirrors her mother, Goldie Hawn, in a hot go-go-girl number, there is no place for her character in the film. There’s Fergie, who can really sing, as a small-town whore, Saraghina, – and sing she does! Her “Be Italian” is the one tune that stays with you all the way out of the theatre and long into your weekend. But of all the women, it’s Oscar-winner Marion Cotillard as Guido’s elegant and understated wife, Louisa, who alone brings a note of real pain and sorrow to the otherwise circus-like proceedings.
Nine is based on a hit Broadway musical, which in turn was based on Federico Fellini’s semi-autoboiographical masterpiece 81/2. The problem with the movie is that despite all the Broadway glitz and glam, the ear-catching voices and the eye-catching cleavage, director Rob Marshall (who also oversaw Chicago) still fails to inject a soul into the proceedings. About one-third of the way through, Guido’s muses are revealed and the movie hits a brick wall. Day Lewis’s expressions and body language impeccably convey his anxiety and pain, but we never see his passion (for his films or his women.) Instead the body of women, and I do mean body, endlessly circles him, and we find ourselves fixated on the spectacle – and not much more. Fellini’s 8 ½ is a movie about creative exhaustion and what it tells us about the creative process. Nine is just about what happens when a guy gets too much t & a. Two and a half tiaras