February 26, 2010: Nine
This film, Nine, had a bunch of strikes against it by the time I’d merely seen the poster. Director Rob Marshall was the man behind Chicago, Best Picture winner for 2002 and the movie I had to accept as an Oscar-winning musical in order to get it out of Hollywood’s system so they could get back to letting real movies win awards. Penelope Cruz is heavily featured here, and while I can’t quite put my finger on why, I’m most definitely not a fan of hers. And an ensemble cast of questionable coherence, including none other than the annoying Sophia Loren, made me dread having to see Nine when it got its inevitable Oscar nominations. It ended up with four – Supporting Actress for Penelope Cruz, an original song, and Art Direction and Costume Design.
The tone and look are similar to Chicago. The music is OK, and the production design and costumes are impressive enough as per the nominations, although one could easily make the opposite argument and say that the music is uninventive and the sets are just a bunch of scaffolding. But the story carries some extra level of interest for me, as it centres around a filmmaker, played by two-time Oscar winner Daniel Day-Lewis, a Fellini-esque character who is struggling to make his next film. The film, as it turns out, has been greenlighted based on the past success of the director and is actively casting and searching for locations, but in fact it hasn’t been written at all. Nine boils down to being a love letter to the aesthetic of Italian cinema, and I have to respect that.
Of course, when we add Cruz and her usual exotic “overdramatics”, Nicole Kidman spouting a terrible Italian accent, people breaking into song for no reason (which tends to be a real sticking point with me, Grease notwithstanding), and a broadly-drawn wife-mistress conflict subplot, and the movie starts to seem a bit scattered and lose me. OK, I get it, I know what the movie is about, now let’s get on with it! I could easily have never seen this movie, and it doesn’t even have the story depth or coherence of a more fully-developed musical such as, I hate to admit it, Chicago.
Even a musical about movies disappoints.
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