Nine

First a confession. I dislike musicals. No, that’s untrue. I loathe musicals. I loathe them in much the same way that I loathe Ryanair baggage charges. Or root canal surgery. Or the post-pub, Cro-magnon wank-a-thon, Danny Dyer’s Hardest Men. I just cannot see the appeal. All that breathy over enunciation. The razzle. Yeah! The dazzle. Yeah! YEAH! The big, lungy singing and the high kicking and the weary and ultimately rather tragic “raciness”. The ridiculous sub ‘Ello ‘Ello accents, the painful exposition and the “amusing” asides. The in-jokes and all the self-congratulatory back-slapping and gurning. All that stage school, theatrical bonhomie. I may be missing the point entirely but it all just baffles me. Musicals, to me, feel like the rather embarrassing, screeching aunt-at-a-wedding. Over cooked, slightly desperate and just to painful to watch.

So going to see Nine, the new film from the director of Chicago, Rob Marshall, was always going to be something of a personal challenge. And I wasn’t to be disappointed by my complete lack of expectation. The last time that I felt this uncomfortable was crawling through the Cu Chi tunnels on a tourist trip to Ho Chi Minh City. Although credit to the Vietcong, the tunnels were better lit and there is a certain collective spirit to be had dragging yourself on your hands and knees in 98% humidity with you face pressed into the voluminous buttocks of a stationary salesman from Baton Rouge.

Nine is a self-indulgent turkey of unmitigated proportions. On paper, I suppose, it should have been magnificent. The film is drowning in, or is that sinking under the weight of, star quality: Judi Dench, Marion Cotillard, Nicole Kidman, Penelope Cruz, Kate Hudson, Stacy Ferguson and even that venerable siren of yesteryear European cinema, Sophia Loren. They are all variously, and predictably, beautiful, pouty, husky, busty, scantily clothed, wise, mysterious and alluring. And the sets are frequently quite staggering. But the film is so contrived, awkward and ridiculously ham-fisted that it is impossible to take it or its stars remotely seriously for even a moment. It is a monumental over-baked pudding of extraordinary confusion, condescension and superficial posturing. And shouting.

And then there is Daniel Day-Lewis. It is difficult to know where to begin here. Day-Lewis is one of cinema’s great actors and his performance in There Will Be Blood one of the defining screen roles of this or any generation. His Bill the Butcher in Gangs of New York is, for my mind, lagging not too far behind. His reputation and brilliance hinge on his complete immersion in the roles that he accepts, his reluctance to talk about his methods and the accompanying eccentric mystery that this provokes, and the astuteness with which he accepts those roles in the first place. You wouldn’t catch a giant of his reputation, for example, hamming-it-up and tragically mis-firing in an overblown, catastrophic folly that is to the film to which it pays homage, Frederico Fellini’s masterly, towering 8½ (radical, challenging, intelligent, beautiful) what The Muppets’ Treasure Island is to Robert Louis Stevenson’s 1883 novel of high seas adventure, piracy and virtue…..oh, Daniel, what have you done? (Chorus: What have you done? What have you done? What have you done?)

Without doubt I hauled a disproportionate bag load of prejudice into this film and there was every likelihood I was never really going to like it. Or even mildly enjoy it. But what can you do? That’s what prejudice does to you. It makes you small-minded. And bitter. So if you like musicals and have sat happily grinning through or, God forbid, singing along to Cats or Joseph or, sweet Jesus, Annie, go and see Nine. And if you don’t, don’t. Watch Fellini’s film instead. I’m sorry if that all seems a little flippant but I’m still trying to get the feeling back in my head. In my head. IN MY HEAD! YEAH!