FOLLOWING his auspicious screenwriting debut with Go (1999), John August scripted the two Charlie's Angels movies and Tim Burton's last three films. The Nines, his first feature as writer and director, is closest in form to Go, which observed an eventful night from three different perspectives, and it draws on August's personal experiences when he was developing a TV series DC.
The upheavals of that TV production caused August to have a nervous breakdown, and he revisits the crisis as a form
of public therapy in the second and most satisfying of the three loosely connected stories that constitute The Nines. Ryan Reynolds plays Gavin, a gay TV writer-producer working on the pilot for a new series in which he has cast his best friend, Melissa McCarthy, who plays herself, or at least a version of herself.
This section is ambiguously titled Reality Television because the machinations behind the production are closely observed by a fictional reality TV show, and because it so directly addresses the deeply unpleasant reality behind making a TV series under the control of a powerful network and its manipulative executive (played by Hope Davis). When the network raises a casting problem that faces Gavin with a painful personal dilemma, this story scorches with anger and real-life drama.
In the opening segment, The Prisoner, Reynolds plays Gary, a TV cop show actor who goes on a binge of drinking and crack cocaine after the break-up of a relationship. He is put under house arrest in the Beverly Hills home of a producer who is out of town (and is Gavin from the second story). McCarthy this time plays his minder, a publicist adept at handling troubled actors, having taken care of Robert Downey Jr after several of his escapades. Davis here plays Gary's neighbour, who comes on to him.
The final story, Knowing, takes its title from the TV pilot Gavin is shooting. Reynolds plays a successful videogame designer whose car breaks down in a canyon, stranding him, his wife (McCarthy) and their mute daughter (Elle Fanning) until he meets an enigmatic stranger (Davis).
It is unfortunate that this sequence is the weakest and least coherent of the stories in August's agreeably teasing and sharply written film. The three characters played by Reynolds (who demonstrates a previously hidden dramatic range) are men who create characters for a living, and each of them has the same first initial, G. This prompts the oft-quoted line about directors playing God, and God just happens to be the title of the short film August directed before Go was shot.
Music plays an effective role on the eclectic soundtrack, which features a Chopin nocturne, Snow Patrol, Juliet Turner, Ferris Wheel, and most playfully, Peggy Lee's half- spoken, half-sung Is That All There Is?. The latter is introduced as part of Davis's dialogue in the first story before she bursts into song.
