Post by Eddie Love on Jan 8, 2011 10:55:21 GMT -5
One of the reasons the genre of the movie musical has died seems to be that even those people who are still practitioners of their production seem to hate them. They’ll go out of their way to fashion any pretense to assure the audience that, whatever razzle-dazzle is up on the screen – “Trust us, this isn’t one of those corny old warhorses were for God’s sake people stop and sing to each other. That stuff is so gay!” So while teenyboppers may Glee-fully see HIGH SCHOOL MUSICAL 3 in droves, grown-ups who want to see real movie musicals have to content themselves with jaded, half-measures like 2009’s NINE. A classic example of a bad idea gone wrong.
The film’s makers deserve some credit for at least having the moxie to put together a big screen extravaganza that was foolproof bait for critical annihilation. The reasons being:
1) The film is based on a Broadway musical and the big critics (ala those at the Times) by and large hate musicals in general and those that were hits onstage in particular. (This may be the time worn critical hand-me-down based on the fact that Pauline Kael, the dean of American film criticism (and the only film critic ever who was a truly great writer in her only right) predictably disdained anything that came to the screen by way of the stage as the critical standards of Broadway in the 60s and 70s (and their audiences’ taste) were deemed less refined than those of the film world.
2) NINE comes on the heels of the same director’s Oscar-winning best picture CHICAGO, which was a movie that blew people away when it was first released, but is one of those films that people rarely mention charitably a few years later. Some critical reverse engineering was due.
3) The film remakes one of the unassailable masterpieces of world cinema. No way A.O. Scott et al would let that one get by without giving us some notes from their Fellini lecture.
4) Oh yeah, it kinda sucks.
The film tells the same story as Federico Fellini’s autobiographical fantasia 8 ½. Guido Continti, a celebrated filmmaker, retreats to an Italian spa where he searches for inspiration for his latest film why ducking his producers and juggling his wife, mistress and the spectres of his feminine muses past and present. Fellini’s film may enjoy a rarefied reputation as an art film landmark, but it’s also laugh-out-loud funny and thoroughly accessible. Even as its themes and images are teasingly obscure, it’s dramatically potent.
It’s also a beautiful, bittersweet portrait of a marriage, and as such you can see where the story would lend itself to the musical theater form. I’ve never seen this show on stage where it was created by the maestro Tommy Tune. But what finds its way on screen in the film version is wanting from the word go.
There’s always something depressing about seeing a film great who’s famously reclusive and discriminating show up on screen in a misfire, and that’s certainly the case with Daniel Day-Lewis as Guido. He looks great, but as a singer and a dancer…he’s a great actor. Unfortunately, the “book” scenes aren’t that well written, so he doesn’t pick up any steam there. Coming off THERE WILL BE BLOOD, this is a colossal detour.
Not all of which is the actor’s fault. The film goes out of its way to tweak the story such that Guido is made to be intensely unlikable. In the original, he’s a faithless rogue, but one who’s oddly lovable. It’s a fine line and Fellini walks it by convincing us that we’d make allowances to an artist as well as someone who’s sexual opportunities extend beyond the everyday. He’s a romantically incorrect libertine and embodied by Marcello Mastroianni: a complete charmer. But in NINE, he’s cruel. In the first film his mistress comically prattles on about her never shown husband to whom she’s devoted and can’t Guido help him out? Later she’s bedridden at her hotel with the flu. Here, we see the husband and he’s a pathetic, heartbroken figure and she’s bedridden after a suicide attempt. Yeah, that’s not so funny, Guido.
Also, in the first film Luisa, Guido’s wife, becomes furious when she sits and watches rushes of Guido’s latest film and the scenes enacted onscreen clearly parallel their relationship to her horror and the snarky amusement of others seated around here. In NINE she watches screen-tests where Guido lavishes the same lines on the auditioning actresses we saw him use to court here in earlier scenes. Not the same thing. This Guido is kind of a prick.
The tin ear to the adaptation extends to other areas as well. In the original there’s a hilarious flashback to Guido being punished by his mother (Sophia Loren) and the priests at his school for visiting the local prostitute and paying her to dance. The same scene is recreated here and it’s in deadly earnest. Did they not get the original scene at all?
NINE is a great looking movie. While 8 ½ is shot in sun-seared black and white – it’s one of the whitest films ever made -- NINE is rendered in rich, inky blue-blacks. But, the film has more of the swinging-60s feel of LA DOLCE VIDA than it does 8 ½. Ultimately, the look of Fellini’s original is how we know who Guido is as an artist. The dream sequences and odd fancies we see throughout his day we relate to his aesthetic. What is the aesthetic of the Guido in NINE? Either that of Italian variety shows of the 60s – if they’d had faster editing – or the look of the ads you see today in Vanity Fair. Since we can’t buy him as an artist, we’re not likely to cut him any slack in his personal life.
There are some pleasures in the film, largely served up by the actresses who play wife and mistress. Penelope Cruz manages to ring some humor out of some of her scenes with Guido. And if your idea of a good time is watching her sexily roll around in lingerie – and mine is – there’s that too. (Although her big number is strangely, poorly lip-synced.)
If she raises the temperature, Marion Cotillard as Guido’s long-suffering wife is the embodiment of cool elegance. She also gives a subtle but passionate performance and perfectly sings the movie’s best song, with a gorgeous bridge, My Husband Makes Movies. The sequence includes a flashback to Guido and his camera falling in love with her in one breathtaking close-up and every straight man and gay woman in the audience will do the same. What a face.
But even this strength of the picture is marred, as the wife has a degrading number towards the end where she dances a kind of frantic, low-rent striptease. For a film that aspires to a level of sophisticated sensuality, it’s a very sex negative portrait. It’s dissonance is not unlike the closing of CHICAGO where we’re asked to enjoy a big song-and-dance number by performers we’d looked down on as talent-less fools for the prior two hours.
Finally, Guido has an entirely unmemorable song with his muse, an Italian screen siren played by Nicole Kidman. In the original film this role is played by Claudia Cardinale as the personification of ample, ripe young womanhood, and boy howdy did she personify. In Fellini’s film Guido is intoxicated with this girl, but ruefully so as she represents all the women he’ll never have, all the beauty he’s never to attain. Well, not to be a pig about it, but, given this film has large sections of women dancing around in lingerie, -- okay, I’ll go there: when you’re married to Marion Cotillard and your mistress is Penelope Cruz do you really sit up nights musing about Nicole Kidman? She’s a great actress and still a knockout, but she’s out of place here. As is Kate Hudson, who though she delivers one of the livelier numbers, is really unflatteringly shot.
Fellini’s film ends with Guido attempting a reconciliation with his wife in a narration we don’t know if he’s actually speaking to her. In a long shot, they take hands and it’s a thrillingly moving moment. In NINE we get that awful romantic comedy lacuna after the climax where some time has to elapse before the hero sets out to win his wife or girlfriend back. Ugh.
As frustrating as it is, there’s something admirable in how misguided NINE is. I can’t believe the filmmakers thought a mass audience would want to see this. Yet at the same time it’s deliberately cold, an odd concept for a movie musical, especially one based on such passionate source material. Maybe if the talented Rob Marshall let down the jaded aesthetic, seen here and in CHICAGO, that says all musical scenes have to be dreams or performances, or internal fantasies – no one must ever stop the action and sing to each other, he could have done something truly memorable and not simply fitfully amusing. As it is, a few scenes aside, I can’t imagine anyone being entertained by this.
The film’s makers deserve some credit for at least having the moxie to put together a big screen extravaganza that was foolproof bait for critical annihilation. The reasons being:
1) The film is based on a Broadway musical and the big critics (ala those at the Times) by and large hate musicals in general and those that were hits onstage in particular. (This may be the time worn critical hand-me-down based on the fact that Pauline Kael, the dean of American film criticism (and the only film critic ever who was a truly great writer in her only right) predictably disdained anything that came to the screen by way of the stage as the critical standards of Broadway in the 60s and 70s (and their audiences’ taste) were deemed less refined than those of the film world.
2) NINE comes on the heels of the same director’s Oscar-winning best picture CHICAGO, which was a movie that blew people away when it was first released, but is one of those films that people rarely mention charitably a few years later. Some critical reverse engineering was due.
3) The film remakes one of the unassailable masterpieces of world cinema. No way A.O. Scott et al would let that one get by without giving us some notes from their Fellini lecture.
4) Oh yeah, it kinda sucks.
The film tells the same story as Federico Fellini’s autobiographical fantasia 8 ½. Guido Continti, a celebrated filmmaker, retreats to an Italian spa where he searches for inspiration for his latest film why ducking his producers and juggling his wife, mistress and the spectres of his feminine muses past and present. Fellini’s film may enjoy a rarefied reputation as an art film landmark, but it’s also laugh-out-loud funny and thoroughly accessible. Even as its themes and images are teasingly obscure, it’s dramatically potent.
It’s also a beautiful, bittersweet portrait of a marriage, and as such you can see where the story would lend itself to the musical theater form. I’ve never seen this show on stage where it was created by the maestro Tommy Tune. But what finds its way on screen in the film version is wanting from the word go.
There’s always something depressing about seeing a film great who’s famously reclusive and discriminating show up on screen in a misfire, and that’s certainly the case with Daniel Day-Lewis as Guido. He looks great, but as a singer and a dancer…he’s a great actor. Unfortunately, the “book” scenes aren’t that well written, so he doesn’t pick up any steam there. Coming off THERE WILL BE BLOOD, this is a colossal detour.
Not all of which is the actor’s fault. The film goes out of its way to tweak the story such that Guido is made to be intensely unlikable. In the original, he’s a faithless rogue, but one who’s oddly lovable. It’s a fine line and Fellini walks it by convincing us that we’d make allowances to an artist as well as someone who’s sexual opportunities extend beyond the everyday. He’s a romantically incorrect libertine and embodied by Marcello Mastroianni: a complete charmer. But in NINE, he’s cruel. In the first film his mistress comically prattles on about her never shown husband to whom she’s devoted and can’t Guido help him out? Later she’s bedridden at her hotel with the flu. Here, we see the husband and he’s a pathetic, heartbroken figure and she’s bedridden after a suicide attempt. Yeah, that’s not so funny, Guido.
Also, in the first film Luisa, Guido’s wife, becomes furious when she sits and watches rushes of Guido’s latest film and the scenes enacted onscreen clearly parallel their relationship to her horror and the snarky amusement of others seated around here. In NINE she watches screen-tests where Guido lavishes the same lines on the auditioning actresses we saw him use to court here in earlier scenes. Not the same thing. This Guido is kind of a prick.
The tin ear to the adaptation extends to other areas as well. In the original there’s a hilarious flashback to Guido being punished by his mother (Sophia Loren) and the priests at his school for visiting the local prostitute and paying her to dance. The same scene is recreated here and it’s in deadly earnest. Did they not get the original scene at all?
NINE is a great looking movie. While 8 ½ is shot in sun-seared black and white – it’s one of the whitest films ever made -- NINE is rendered in rich, inky blue-blacks. But, the film has more of the swinging-60s feel of LA DOLCE VIDA than it does 8 ½. Ultimately, the look of Fellini’s original is how we know who Guido is as an artist. The dream sequences and odd fancies we see throughout his day we relate to his aesthetic. What is the aesthetic of the Guido in NINE? Either that of Italian variety shows of the 60s – if they’d had faster editing – or the look of the ads you see today in Vanity Fair. Since we can’t buy him as an artist, we’re not likely to cut him any slack in his personal life.
There are some pleasures in the film, largely served up by the actresses who play wife and mistress. Penelope Cruz manages to ring some humor out of some of her scenes with Guido. And if your idea of a good time is watching her sexily roll around in lingerie – and mine is – there’s that too. (Although her big number is strangely, poorly lip-synced.)
If she raises the temperature, Marion Cotillard as Guido’s long-suffering wife is the embodiment of cool elegance. She also gives a subtle but passionate performance and perfectly sings the movie’s best song, with a gorgeous bridge, My Husband Makes Movies. The sequence includes a flashback to Guido and his camera falling in love with her in one breathtaking close-up and every straight man and gay woman in the audience will do the same. What a face.
But even this strength of the picture is marred, as the wife has a degrading number towards the end where she dances a kind of frantic, low-rent striptease. For a film that aspires to a level of sophisticated sensuality, it’s a very sex negative portrait. It’s dissonance is not unlike the closing of CHICAGO where we’re asked to enjoy a big song-and-dance number by performers we’d looked down on as talent-less fools for the prior two hours.
Finally, Guido has an entirely unmemorable song with his muse, an Italian screen siren played by Nicole Kidman. In the original film this role is played by Claudia Cardinale as the personification of ample, ripe young womanhood, and boy howdy did she personify. In Fellini’s film Guido is intoxicated with this girl, but ruefully so as she represents all the women he’ll never have, all the beauty he’s never to attain. Well, not to be a pig about it, but, given this film has large sections of women dancing around in lingerie, -- okay, I’ll go there: when you’re married to Marion Cotillard and your mistress is Penelope Cruz do you really sit up nights musing about Nicole Kidman? She’s a great actress and still a knockout, but she’s out of place here. As is Kate Hudson, who though she delivers one of the livelier numbers, is really unflatteringly shot.
Fellini’s film ends with Guido attempting a reconciliation with his wife in a narration we don’t know if he’s actually speaking to her. In a long shot, they take hands and it’s a thrillingly moving moment. In NINE we get that awful romantic comedy lacuna after the climax where some time has to elapse before the hero sets out to win his wife or girlfriend back. Ugh.
As frustrating as it is, there’s something admirable in how misguided NINE is. I can’t believe the filmmakers thought a mass audience would want to see this. Yet at the same time it’s deliberately cold, an odd concept for a movie musical, especially one based on such passionate source material. Maybe if the talented Rob Marshall let down the jaded aesthetic, seen here and in CHICAGO, that says all musical scenes have to be dreams or performances, or internal fantasies – no one must ever stop the action and sing to each other, he could have done something truly memorable and not simply fitfully amusing. As it is, a few scenes aside, I can’t imagine anyone being entertained by this.