Directed by Rob Marshall. Starring Daniel Day-Lewis, Marion Cotillard , Penélope Cruz, Nicole Kidman, Judi Dench, Kate Hudson, Sophia Loren. 12A cert, gen release, 118 min
WHEN, A YEAR or so ago, details emerged about this curious project, cinema pundits wondered if Rob Marshall had acquired embarrassing Polaroids featuring every major star in Hollywood. Just look at that cast list. Day-Lewis, Cotillard, Cruz, Dench, Kidman, Loren: I count seven Oscars there alone. Kate Hudson can rarely have felt so much like a civilian. (Come to think of it, what isKate Hudson doing in this company? Couldn't Rob get Hilary Duff?) All this talent for a film version of an only modestly famous musical by a director whose last project – the narcoleptic Memoirs of a Geisha– bombed with both critics and the ticket-buying public? What is going on? Alas, no answers present themselves in the dull, tuneless, prosaic final product.
Maury Yeston's original show was not without ambition: Nineis a loose adaptation of Federico Fellini's peerless, self-conscious movie, 8½. Daniel Day-Lewis, charismatic in sunglasses, silk suits and enveloping fag smoke, plays a stratospherically famous Italian film director who, following a serious of flops, finds himself in severe state of artistic stasis. While he struggles to get a new project off the ground, he has various traumatic encounters with his wife (Cotillard, strong), girlfriend (the ruthless movie-killer that is Cruz-in-English), former leading lady (Kidman, typically robotic), costume designer (a reliably likable Dench) and mother (impossibly nut-coloured Loren).
Some of the creative decisions that made Marshall's Chicagoso ordinary echo through Nine. Forced, in an era where stars of musical theatre achieve only the mildest class of fame, to rely on non-singing, non-dancing actors, the director allows his cast to half-speak the lines while he cuts furiously to obscure the ordinariness of their hoofing. Mind you, the songs are so useless, it's hard to imagine even Ethel Merman making them sparkle.
Utilising rhymes that Noel Gallagher would reject as banal, the ditties run mechanically up and down the keyboard before settling upon the most clunking musical and lyrical cliches.
Meanwhile, Fellini's silvery dreamworld has been replaced by a poundingly explicit representation of tourist Italy where – in a reference to La Dolce Vita– the sexless, dead-eyed Nicole Kidman stands in for the earthy, uninhibited Anita Ekberg. You know you're in trouble when, despite the stellar nature of that cast, you have to rely on Fergie from The Black Eyed Peas for your film's finest set piece: the agreeably fabulous Be Italian. What was in those Polaroids?
