The movie expands uponthe Broadway show, transforming it cinematicallyand rightly so, given thetopic. Nine concerns a mid-1960sItalian director, a thinly disguised Federico Fellini, called Guido Contini.Among many other things, Fellini was famous for a film called 8½. The concept of the musical willdelight anyone who loves European art house films, but requires no specialknowledge to follow the story.
Marshall mounted his beautifully realizedproduction with an all-star cast. Especially impressive is Daniel Day-Lewis asthe fast-driving, fast-living Contini. Racing around Rome in a flashy sports car, wearingsunglasses after dark and ducking the paparazzi at every turn, he juggles theattentions of his leading lady (Nicole Kidman), his wife (Marion Cotillard) andhis mistress (Penelope Cruz).
Contini considers filmto be a dream whose evanescence he tries to capture. But the dreamlike settingof Cinecitta, the massive Roman studio Mussolini built to rival Hollywood, has become theprison for his imagination. He is blocked and addled, can't sleep or think, andhas only days before beginning a film for which he has neither script norinspiration.
Many of the Bob Fosse-like song and dancenumbers represent Contini's reveries on his own greatness and the women hedesires; others reflect the perspectives of the many women in his life,including his mother (Sophia Loren), his factotum (Judi Dench) and a Vogue reporter who pursues him (KateHudson). Nine conveys the stylishnessand wit of Fellini's films but also the melancholy underlying his vision of asociety given over to the pursuit of pleasure.