Nine (2009)
Directed by Rob Marshall
Arrogant, self-centered movie director Guido Contini finds himself struggling to find meaning, purpose, and a script for his latest film endeavor. With only a week left before shooting begins, he desperately searches for answers and inspiration from his wife, his mistress, his muse, and his mother.
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3 films that influenced Nine
What critics say influenced Nine
Mastroainni is such a mischievous screen presence, one need only take a brief look at Daniel Day-Lewis (inarguably a better actor who happens to be all wrong for the role) as Guido in the recent woebegotten musical adaptation Nine to see what a vapid pit of angsty self-pity into which this all could have descended.
The director in Federico Fellini’s autobiographical film masterpiece 8½ (1963), the basis for Nine, was more likable.
Nine is a cinematic adaptation of a 1982 Broadway musical, which was itself an adaptation of Federico Fellini’s playful, self-reflexive and semi-autobiographical 1963 film 8½.
“Nine” is a disastrously misguided re-imagining of the Italian director’s legendary film “8½” in which all the thoughtful and interesting parts have been amputated and replaced with Broadway cheese and Hollywood superficiality.
Adapted from the 1982 Tony-winning Broadway play (book by Arthur L. Kopit, music and lyrics by Maury Yeston), which, in turn, was inspired by Federico Fellini's 1963 Oscar-winning masterpiece "8½," "Nine" combines a dream cast with a dreamy script and score for a thoughtful and enjoyable musical about art, life and love.
Remaking Federico Fellini's epochal 1963 masterwork 8½ is not at all as heinous as it sounds: indeed, if we were to start listing films clearly influenced by Fellini's massively self-reflective pseudo-autobiographical movie about an Italian film director who can't come up with an idea for his next project, we'd even stumble across some near-masterpieces.
There have been and will continue to be great movies made about the struggle of megalomaniacal directors to reconcile their life and work—Fosse made one with his own musical Fellini homage, All That Jazz, and Charlie Kaufman another just last year with Synecdoche, New York.
I didn't think it was possible for Daniel Day-Lewis to be anything but brilliant, but director Rob Marshall ("Chicago," "Memoirs of a Geisha") has seemingly accomplished the impossible.
To put it kindly, Marshall is not a particularly bold or stylish director in his own right (as anyone who managed to make it through the slog that was “Memoirs of a Geisha” can attest) and trying to overtly emulate Fellini’s style would have led to disaster.
He is the middling director who created the deeply shallow prettyfest Memoirs of a Geisha back in 2005, and ruined the fuck out of John Kander and Fred Ebb's Chicago in 2002 - in this reviewer's eyes, one of the strongest stage musicals ever created, and one might despair that if he could do that, then Nine never had a chance.
Here, Marshall, who enjoyed a freshman triumph with Chicago and endured a sophomore slump with Memoirs of a Geisha, doesn't so much build a musical drama as wrangle an indifferently paced variety show.
There isn’t a single intriguing, amusing, passionate or inspiring visual to be found in Nine, directed by Rob Marshall whose previous credits include the bland Memoirs of a Geisha, and the acclaimed Broadway musical adaptation, Chicago.
Marshall, whose previous films include the popular but unarresting adaptation of the stage hit Chicago and the visually beautiful but listless Memoirs of a Geisha, has gathered in Nine an impressive stable of on- and off-screen talent but never gets these various pieces to jell.