January 6, 2009
Review Throwdown: 8½ vs. Nine
Fellini Wins
Since 8½ was playing at our local arthouse, my friends and I decided to see it before we saw Nine. I'd never seen 8½ before, but I kind of dug Fellini's naked psyche. I mean, it's like he's having an argument with himself onscreen. I'm sure I should have been offended by the house of women, but Rossella keeps popping up to remind Guido of what a jackass he's being, even in his own fantasy. There's enough irony and self-awareness here to keep me from hating Fellini or Guido (Marcello Mastroianni, a proto-Clooney if ever I saw one) and it's so nice to see actresses that look like real women.
Yesterday we saw Nine and, well, it wasn't good. It was like my students' answers on tests. They parrot back exactly the wrong information, spewing irrelevant but accientally catchy phrases I've said in class. But they're ADHD-riddled twenty-year-olds. I don't know what excuse the (presumably grownup) filmmakers have for their poor interpretation.
Fellini's movie was, ironically, believable; he had a gift for realistically representing how flights of fancy and dreams can take us unawares. Nine opts instead for clumsy scene shifts -- there's not even a dissolve -- lazily falling back on the dictates of a musical so people can just burst into song. Fair enough, but the music is pedestrian and the lyrics are execrable. Essentially, you're punished for knowing anything about musicals or Fellini.
Sunglasses doth not a Guido make
And Nine had not a hint of irony. Oh, it thinks it does. It puts smart remarks into the mouths of its characters. But Fellini did better than that, letting the irony speak for itself, successfully creating distance from his subjects, and not assuming the viewer would inhabit Guido's pysche without a fight. Nine has no distance whatsoever, which makes this Guido (Daniel Day-Lewis) completely, unsympathetically narcissistic. In fact, this viewer felt downright irked as the film presumptously demanded that I care about Guido's whiny little self-obsession.
Sexy? Yes. Fellini? No.
In general the relationships in Nine are laughable, and that even goes for the sexuality. Nine wants to be Bob Fosse but ends up as a Victoria's Secret ad. I mean, the ladies were dancing their asses off, pretty amazingly I will admit, but the burlesque seemed like the same pretend-hot hetero charade that Alan Ball gives us in True Blood. Given that Rob Marshall directed Chicago (which was believably sexy) before he did Nine, I'm going to blame the music guys again. The songs were so bad, perhaps the actors just couldn't muster any real sex appeal to go with them. Honestly, I don't know how the original musical won so many awards, and one of the new songs, 'Cinema Italiano', felt like it had been written in five minutes.
