Cinematically Inclined: “Nine”

Sometimes, you hear about a film project and it’s an absolute dream. You line up a prestigious director, decorated cast consisting of award-winning actors, throw it a big budget and slot it for a prestigious holiday release, in anticipation of big box office and critical hosannas translating into a slew of show-business awards. And then sometimes it goes terribly wrong.

In 2008, plans were finalized for the film version of the Best Musical Tony Award-winning play Nine. It seemed to be a natural fit for a film project. The original musical was based on Federico Fellini’s classic movie 8 ½. One of the plays the original musical beat for the Tony, Dreamgirls, was adapted into a highly successful film version in 2006. Nine was meant to join the burgeoning renaissance of movie musicals, which includes not only Dreamgirls but also Moulin Rouge!, Hairspray, the Best Picture Oscar winner Chicago and Mamma Mia!, which became the highest-grossing film of all time in the UK. Nine’s glorious cast included Oscar winners Daniel Day-Lewis, Marion Cotillard, Penelope Cruz, Dame Judi Dench, Nicole Kidman and Sophia Loren, plus nominee Kate Hudson and Grammy-winning singer-rapper Fergie. The project was helmed by Rob Marshall, who shepherded Chicago to roaring success. It had the backing of The Weinstein Company, with an incredible track record of box office and Oscar winners dating back to 1992. And a sensational trailer that debuted at Cannes amidst a flurry of publicity to exhibitors and ecstatic advance word:

So why did the project fail? One could easily blame the intense box office competition at the time the film went into wide release. The blockbuster Avatar appealed to all demographics and became a cultural event, and the reboot of Sherlock Holmes, it could be argued, had siphoned the more mature audience that was meant for the sophisticated Nine. One might make the case that its failure was also owed to Up in the Air, the acclaimed dramedy that was also attracting the same crowd. Had an overabundance of films aimed at the same demographic cannibalized the audience? Sure, you could have argued that, but how does that explain why the film received mixed to dismal reviews? I was absolutely ecstatic to see the trailer in the spring of 2009, but the final project felt underwhelming when I finally caught it at a New Year’s Day matinee performance. It wasn’t from distaste for the genre, either, so that argument was out.

A word on the marginal plot, taken directly from Fellini’s original 1963 film. Movie director Guido (Day-Lewis) has director’s block and is working on his latest project following a nervous breakdown. He has no script and no confirmed cast, only a leading lady (Kidman) and some sets. His loyal costume designer (Dench) has been working with him forever and wants him to do something about his procrastination. Heck, the whole movie is two hours of procrastination, set to music. He’s been cheating on his wife (Cotillard) with longtime mistress Carla (Cruz), and both come to the town where he’s filming the movie. An American journalist (Hudson) has started asking uncomfortable questions (he’s hiding his recent meltdown from the press). His mother (Loren) figures in his imagination, as does the town whore (Fergie) who introduced him to the mystique of the female gender in his boyhood. Nine concerns whether his wife ultimately wises up and leaves him, and whether or not the film is made. Neither question’s answer is at all consequential.

When Marty Met Edie: The Age of Innocence (A Modern Film Classic)

In 1993, Oscar-winning director Martin Scorsese, famed for his violent crime dramas and character studies such as Raging Bull, GoodFellas and Cape Fear, did the unthinkable: he released a PG-rated costume drama where no blood is spilled and no obscenities are uttered. Based on Edith Wharton’s landmark work of American literature, and still one of the single greatest novels in history, The Age of Innocence was a dissection of old New York society in the 1870s. Having been introduced to Scorsese via his controversial maelstrom The Last Temptation of Christ in 1988, the Blogger was as surprised as many in the industry that Scorsese would have chosen a seemingly genteel period piece, with plenty of corsets but nary a pistol in sight. 

What Scorsese saw in Wharton’s seminal work was apparent to those familiar with the original novel. The old way of doing battle in polite, moneyed society was not through duels and fisticuffs, but through the most powerful weapon of all: words. Wharton’s chronicle of a love triangle and its shattering effect on one man’s happiness, due to social constraint and circumstance, critiqued the old New York society in which she grew up with a knife’s edge. This was a place where the weapon of choice was good old-fashioned gossip. War was waged in salons, country homes, ballrooms and studies. It’s no wonder Scorsese was drawn to the project, because the battlefield was fraught with completely invisible landmines.

Day-Lewis and Ryder, as
Newland Archer and May Welland

The triangle consists of well-to-do Manhattan lawyer Newland Archer (Daniel Day-Lewis in the film). He is engaged to the prim and proper, but never distant, May Welland (Winona Ryder). Their forthcoming marriage would align two of New York’s most powerful and respected families. In other words, it was not so much a wedding as a power-brokered M&A. Into this world comes May’s black sheep cousin, the Countess Ellen Olenska (Michelle Pfeiffer), an unconventional sort who wore black satin to her coming-out ball, married Polish nobility, and has returned to America to flee her flailing marriage. Humiliated and going through the painful motions of divorce, she is welcomed back to the fold and into society, but beneath everyone’s veneer lurks something more sinister. Countess Olenska is the subject of endless gossip and the speculation surrounding the true circumstances of her marriage’s collapse becomes the talk of the town. Newland, like a lawyer, welcomes challenges to conformity and explores them, and becomes irresistibly drawn to her. He handles her divorce proceedings while keeping his own feelings barely constrained. Rather alarmingly but discreetly, he crosses several professional boundaries by declaring his love for the Countess and she confesses to the same. The seemingly innocent May might have noticed all this going on and, if she suspects anything, she doesn’t let on easily. Wharton intended the title of her novel to be ironic, as there is nothing innocent about the comings and goings of this precariously balanced world in that day and age.