These notes are going to be longer than they deserve, convoluted, clumsy, almost entirely narcissistic and pointless which is more than fitting for the film.
So it began when I agreed to accompany my good friend The Leader to a showing of The Road and, because I necessarily had a couple of hours to kill first, I took in Rob Marshall’s abominable remake of Fellini’s masterpiece. I’d already seen a film called 9 which looked good but was soulless and bereft of wit in the last few months; the odds on another must have been long but such is life.
I didn’t know anything about the film as I entered the theatre, other than the stellar list of actors involved. I didn’t know that it was a remake of one of my most beloved films or who the director was (and indeed still is). Rob Marshall is, of course, the guy who made Chicago. I haven’t seen that- why would I?- but he seems to have been keen to repeat the trick here. There’s a lot of supposition there and here’s some more: Rob Zombie would have been a better choice for this film than Marshall. The point of the film is obviously to document a film director’s struggle for inspiration as he comes to terms with the tangles of his personal life. Quite where the idea to interweave this inner turmoil with mediocre show tunes and spangle-clad semi-nude starlets came from I have no idea. It sounds like an idea that was pitched to a producer for a bet.
Daniel Day-Lewis is a fine actor but sells himself short here too. I read an interview with him where he described the process for becoming Daniel Plainview, he said “I found the voice I wanted to use and began work upon him from there”; with Guido Contini he appears to have got the voice and then ended his work upon him there. Likewise a cast of female stars with differing levels of talent (Cruz and Dench at one end, Kate Hudson very much at the other) do just enough in the scenes between the songs.
The overall result is a very dull, ponderous, shallow waste of celluloid. Where Fellini projected his spirit into the film, Marshall sucks the life out of it. But, on the bright side, I did find myself with the recently rare luxury of having time to myself to absorb myself in my thoughts and I worked through some memories and emotions that I hadn’t really touched upon while I was bored with what was happening on-screen.
The protagonist in the movie is, of course, troubled by the fall-out from his irresistible philandering and I was reminded of a line from a Jack Nicholson biography that had a big impact upon me during my formative and highly-suggestible teens: “Jack had never claimed that monogamy was a virtue”. Wanting to be like Jack Nicholson- and what teenage boy wouldn’t- I took this as my mantra and spent the larger part of my adulthood with a spectacularly tangled and troubling personal life. This isn’t anything I’m proud of; it caused pain, heartache, regret and most of all the lost opportunity for happy memories. It also isn’t anything I’ve really thought about since but as a young man, you do seek affirmation and reassurance and you are clumsy and awkward and make mistakes and during the brain-numbingly boring film I found the time to make peace with myself for the events of the 1990s. I was just a kid and I know better now. I thought back to Jimmy Webb’s baroque masterpiece “MacArthurPark” and the line “after all the loves of my life, you’ll still be the one” and reflected upon my good fortune to meet my wife while I was readying myself to grow up and leave behind my careless, selfish, needy, philandering alcoholic ways to become a good and strong and devoted and supportive husband. I could see errors of my own being replayed upon the screen and I know now why I made them and how to forgive myself and why I could never make them again.
None of this is to in any way excuse or condone or show approval of the dreadful spectacle which was being projected above my head throughout the process. It is an indictment upon Nine that I was able to concentrate so easily upon strong and difficult memories. No, I have nothing positive to say about the film at all. But I do have questions about it or, more, specifically about the making of it. What is Marshall saying by making this? Is the conceit that he is the new Fellini? Or that the Maestro’s visual brilliance and deft weaving of fantasy and reality are no match for his rapid-cutting gaudiness? Who in the world could really consider the addition of some show tunes to be the key to making 8½ even better? I simply don’t get it.
8½ could be remade in theory- there is space for reinterpretation in the structure and for a different linearity of narrative; but in truth it is a film made by Fellini for Fellini and about Fellini. That the world is fortunate enough to be privy to seeing is the result of the Auteur being a film-maker and not a diarist or some other more personalised passion. And, if you think about it, the film already has been remade by Woody Allen as a broad farce in the hit-and-miss What’s New Pussycat? And so we’ve already had all the reinvention we need.
There are no show tunes in What’s New Pussycat? either, by the way. It’s a million times better than Nine.
