“Nine” (2009)

To remake a beloved classic is always to play with fire.  Anything that survives long enough to be thought ‘classic’ is unlikely to need much improving.  This is doubly so if the nature of the original is bound up with the genius of its creator.  You wouldn’t think to remake “Citizen Kane”, would you, without Orson Welles at the helm?

The idea of remaking Federico Fellini’s “8 1/2″ when deprived of the guiding spirit of the maestro himself is if anything even more objectionable.  “8 1/2″ isn’t just a classic, it’s one of the cornerstones of the medium, the ultimate meditation on the process of filmmaking.  Moreover, it is a personal statement, Marcello Mastroianni’s Guido, the director of the film-within-the-film, being transparently Fellini himself. 

The only conceivable way “8 1/2″ could be produced by someone other than Fellini is if the creative personality involved was strong enough to escape from the great man’s shadow.  Woody Allen pulled it off with “Stardust Memories” and so, far more obliquely, did Charlie Kaufman on debut a couple of years back in “Synecdoche, New York”.  Rob Marshall, best known for bringing “Chicago” to the screen, is not even remotely in their class.  For one thing, he’s not a writer.  For another, as a director he would seem something of a one trick pony.

Marshall’s approach to “Nine”, a mysteriously successful Broadway musical adaptation of “8 1/2″, is precisely the same as that he brought to “Chicago”.  Rather than have the musical numbers segueing directly from the surrounding narrative he intercuts them as expressions of the lead character’s internal fantasy life.  They become, in effect, production numbers performed on a theatrical stage commenting on the ‘real life’ action.

While this conceit made some sense in “Chicago”, the story of a would be musical entertainer, it is disastrous when it comes to dramatising the internal conflict within a film director’s mind.  Aside from all the creative issues involved with Guido’s latest film - his 9th, I presume - the character has a rich imagination, a complicated personal life which balances wife, mistress and casual encounters with fans, and a back story that includes youthful indiscretions with prostitutes, tension with the Catholic church and a typically intense, Italian relationship with his Mama.  Song and dance numbers don’t do the dramatic material justice, particularly when the lyrics are banal and overly literal and more than half the cast are not that musically competent.

“8 1/2″ was wildly cinematic on every level.  Conceptually and structurally everything flows from Guido’s subjectivity and Fellini’s framing and editing seamlessly sifts between the past and the present and the literal and the fantasy.  “Nine”, by contrast, is grounded in and confined to the theatre, the transitions into and out of the music are heavy handed and there’s a reliance on clunky subtitles to label individual scenes’ place and significance.  Having each of the supporting actors sing their own shop stoppers breaks up the sense that what we are seeing are Guido’s projections: it feels more like a series of objective comments on his character.

I thought Daniel Day Lewis could do anything as an actor but “Nine” cruelly exposes his limitations: he can neither impersonate Mastroianni, which both the script and the director ask him to do, nor give his own approximation of Mastroianni’s effortless charisma and screen presence.  It is a theatrical performance in the worst possible way.

The balance of the cast are a mixed bag.  While it is always good to see old troopers like Judi Dench and Sophia Loren neither are singers as such.  The former seems to be there primarily to give acerbic weight to bad lines and the latter to lend the project a semblance of Italianness it desperately wants but hardly deserves.

Penelope Cruz, as Guido’s official mistress, looks good but struggles dramatically as she usually does in English. Kate Hudson, always a negligible screen presence, at least appears to be having fun as an air headed one night stand.  Nicole Kidman, a forty-something woman who has destroyed her appearance with plastic surgery, is appallingly miscast as Guido’s muse, a role played with breathless beauty in the original film by the divine Claudia Cardinale.

The two actual singers on display give the film what little spark it does have.  It helps that Fergie features in one of the few sequences that take its aesthetic lead from Fellini: a genuine flashback moment when the young Guido is entertained on a beach by a rambunctious whore.  Marion Coitillard, playing Guido’s long suffering wife, is better still, proving that even awful material can achieve poignancy in the right hands.

The ineptness of “Nine” is summed up in its pig’s breakfast of an ending.  In place of Fellini’s carnivalesque circle-of-life set piece conclusion Marshall not only has Guido explicitly fail to make his film but gives him a two-year-later coda.  The cast all stride out for a final bow on ugly scaffolding as though they are strutting on the appendages to a Broadway stage.  You feel like screaming: “It’s a movie, Rob!” and banishing the guy to 42nd St. forever.