Rob Marshall's flawed but frequently dazzling Nine is a hot-blooded musical fantasia full of song, dance, raging emotion and simmering sexuality. We get to watch British acting dynamo Daniel Day-Lewis be Italian as Guido Contini, a genius director of the swinging Sixties (ciao, Federico Fellini) struggling to put the movie in his head up on the screen. That movie concerns the women in his life — mother (Sophia Loren), wife (Marion Cotillard), muse (Nicole Kidman), mistress (Penélope Cruz), reporter (Kate Hudson), colleague (Judi Dench) and whore (Fergie). With an indisputably gifted actor playing ringmaster to such feminine life force, what's not to like? You could argue that Nine, a 1982 Broadway hit spun off from Fellini's own 1963 psychodrama, 8 1/2, and revived in 2003, was never the equal of its source. But Maury Yeston composed a score of surpassing beauty. The challenge for Marshall, following his Oscar-winning Chicago, was to bring another hallucinatory musical to the screen without repeating himself or dimming the material's blazing, untamed theatricality. 
 
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 By my score card, Marshall hits more than he misses. Those who hated his music-video editing in Chicago will hate it here. He errs by cutting three great songs ("Getting Tall," "Be On Your Own," "The Bells of St. Sebastian") for three inferior ones. "Cinema Italiano," sung by Hudson, is a tacky, overproduced misfire. He also shortchanges the influence of Catholicism on this man-child, and keeps Guido's nine-year-old alter ego too much in the shadows. Otherwise, his work is visionary and electric. And the script, by Michael Tolkin and the late, much missed Anthony Minghella, is uncommonly witty. Guido begins the film at a press conference telling reporters that to talk about a movie is to spoil its mystery. So I won't intrude except to say that Day-Lewis (who replaced an exhausted Javier Bardem) handles his two songs in high style and acts the role like the maestro he is, even if he looks as Italian as Big Ben. 
 
 The women are smashing. Kidman tosses off her big number ("Unusual Way"), but Fergie sells hers ("Be Italian"). Dench is a sassy delight. Cruz does wonders as the mistress, sizzling in a rope dance ("Who's afraid to kiss your toes, I'm not") and going on to break your heart when Guido breaks hers. Best of all is Cotillard as the wife, baring her soul in "My Husband Makes Movies" and her body in a new number ("Take It All") that lets her throw the bum out. Cotillard, beautiful and bruising all at once, is perfection. As Marshall gathers his cast together for a finale with cinematographer Dion Beebe, costume whiz Colleen Atwood and production designer John Myhre working at their highest capacity, Nine fires on all cylinders. As Guido sings, "What's a good thing for if not taking it to excess?" Prego. ||||| Nine (out of 4) Starring Daniel Day-Lewis, Marion Cotillard, Penélope Cruz, Judi Dench, Nicole Kidman, Kate Hudson, Sophia Loren and Fergie. Directed by Rob Marshall. 119 minutes. Opens Dec. 25. At major theatres. PG 
 
 
 
 Shut up and eat your ice cream. 
 
 Wait! I kid, and I quote. 
 
 The ice-cream line is from the uppity producer character in 8 1/2, the surreal 1963 Fellini film that begat the 1982 Broadway musical Nine, so named because songwriter Maury Yeston thought his tunes deserved a half nod in the title. Now Nine is an engaging musical film, directed by Rob Marshall (Chicago) and scripted by Michael Tolkin and the late Anthony Minghella (his final work) from Arthur L. Kopit's stage book. 
 
 But to get back to that petulant producer: His ice-cream snipe is what he hurls at a bimbo starlet who is getting on his nerves. 
 
 It serves as excellent counsel for the enjoyment of Nine, a fractured film about creative and coital conundrums that is best sampled like an array of Italian gelatos. In other words, don't complain about how it all works, just enjoy the yummy bits. 
 
 There are plenty of them, mainly the songs by Kate Hudson and Marion Cotillard, but let's get what plot there is out of the way first. 
 
 Daniel Day-Lewis is Guido Contini, a Fellini-esque moviemaker in mid-1960s Rome whose best work is behind him, as everybody keep reminding him. We meet this rogue charmer, "Maestro" as he's known, as he's giving a press conference in Rome's Cinecitta Film Studios, explaining to bewildered journos how you "kill" your movies in the process of making them. 
 
 The Maestro could be referring to himself. On the cusp of 50, Guido is in the midst of a full-blown midlife crisis, more from his inability to keep his pants on than writer's block. Rather than begin the epic film Italia that is to be his latest and greatest project, once again starring his sultry muse Claudia (Nicole Kidman), he flees Rome in his vintage convertible Alfa Romeo. He takes refuge in a swank seaside resort, where there is more marble than the Vatican and more spirits than a graveyard. 
 
 Here Guido, like Dickens' Scrooge, must confront his past, present and future – but Scrooge was fortunate in only having to deal with ghosts. Guido's vexations are all flesh-and-blood, although some of them – notably Sophia Loren as his mother – also appear in his vivid fantasies. 
 
 He begins his follies by foolishly inviting both his wife (Marion Cotillard) and his lover (Penélope Cruz) to join him. 
 
 Marshall's casting is the real draw of Nine. With the exception of Loren, none of his choices are Italian, which could have been a liability in the hands of a less creative director. 
 
 Daniel Day-Lewis makes for a game Guido, but not a perfect one the way Marcello Mastroianni was for 8 1/2. Day-Lewis's Italian accent is at best serviceable, and his singing leaves something to be desired – which may explain why his two numbers are rushed and crushed. Day-Lewis was chosen for his acting ability, not his song-and-dancemanship, and he barely gets away with it. Marshall (and his editor) made a dancer out Richard Gere for Chicago, but he can't quite make a singer of Day-Lewis for Nine. 
 
 The same must be said of Judi Dench, who, as Guido's costume designer and personal nag Lilli, vamps "Folies Bergere" in an ill-advised and incongruous number that services no fantasies and adds nothing to the proceedings. 
 
 When inspiration strikes, it does so as lightning. Kate Hudson stuns in her big-production number "Cinema Italiano," shimmying and smiling her way through a tribute to the Maestro's cinematic achievements, the musical high point of Nine. Who knew that Hudson had such great pipes? 
 
 Cruz also dazzles with her sexy number, "A Call From the Vatican," which is anything but religious. 
 
 Equally impressive, although on a downbeat note, is Marion Cotillard's "My Husband Makes Movies" and the new "Take It All," two songs that buttress the film's meandering cheated-spouse narrative. 
 
 Somewhere between okay and what-the? are the songs-and-dances by the Black Eyed Peas' Fergie, Kidman and Loren. 
 
 Lensing was split between Italian locales and England's Shepperton Studios, and the latter shows in the slightly claustrophobic feel of several of the musical numbers. When cinematographer Dion Beebe is allowed to cut loose, he delivers sweeping scenery that could have you breaking into your own chorus of "Be Italian." 
 
 The one thing really missing from Nine is a consistent sense of fun. Legend has it Fellini filmed 8 1/2 with a note reading, "Remember, it's a comedy" taped to his camera. Marshall and Day-Lewis might have profited from that example. 
 
 The math on Nine doesn't quite add up, yet it gets by. 
 
 So ... shut up and eat your ice cream! ||||| After you've seen Nine, come back here and check out our Spoiler Special discussion: 
 
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 Late December is musical season, time for the release of movies like Chicago, Dreamgirls, or Rob Marshall's latest, Nine (The Weinstein Company): expensive, ungainly screen adaptations of Broadway musicals packed with movie stars whose disproportionate off-screen fame makes them stick out like plums in a Christmas pudding. These musicals seem intended to remind us of the kind of movies "they" don't make anymore, but really, the only thing they remind us of is one another. (Last year's Mamma Mia! doesn't count in this category; it was released in summer, not at Christmastime, and was a fluffy jukebox musical with no aspirations to Oscar prestige.) This kind of movie is superfluous yet strangely compelling. We don't need to see Daniel Day-Lewis and Nicole Kidman sing a duet next to a Roman fountain any more than we need to see an elephant pirouette in a tutu, but wouldn't you be crazy to pass up the opportunity to see either? 
 
 That elephant-in-a-tutu analogy works in more ways than one. There's something about Nine that smacks of the freak show, or the zoo: Step right up, pay $10, and you can see eight superstars, six of whom have won Oscars, singing songs in sparkly costumes. Two of them, Penelope Cruz and Marion Cotillard, will at some point get nearly naked. Never mind that the songs range from mediocre to actively unlistenable and that few of these actors know how to put over a song. Nine is abundantly stocked with star power, but the energy these charismatic performers generate is never harnessed in the service of the movie. 
 
 As Guido Contini, the tormented Italian filmmaker whose fantasy life provides a pretext for the musical numbers, Daniel Day-Lewis has none of the suave dissolution of Marcello Mastroianni, the hero of Fellini's 8 ½, which inspired the original stage show. His Guido is neurasthenic and disheveled, perpetually on the verge of either a laughing or weeping fit. At a creative impasse in his career, Guido is under pressure to begin production on his next film, but despite his blustering press conferences about how the results will change cinematic history, he doesn't even have a script yet. So Guido retreats to a seaside resort town to pretend to write, to fantasize about the women he's known, and to carry on with his needy, fragile mistress (Penelope Cruz), who, like him, is already married. That, essentially, constitutes the entire action of Nine. Once he's reached the resort town, Guido does little but run his fingers through his hair and smoke while waiting for another musical number to begin inside his brain. Leave it to Day-Lewis, the most cerebral of leading men, to sell us on the idea that a character this uninteresting has a rich inner life. 
 
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 Luckily for the stir-crazy audience, Guido has company for his sojourn by the sea. Lilli (Judi Dench), an old friend and the costume designer for his films, arrives to harass him (affectionately) about his nonexistent script. And his wife, Luisa (Marion Cotillard), shows up unexpectedly, providing the occasion for some adultery-based melodrama and the film's best musical number, "Take It All," in which the astonishingly talented Cotillard performs a physical and emotional striptease. But when Guido's muse, an Anita Ekberg-like Scandinavian actress named Claudia (Nicole Kidman) flies in for a costume fitting, everything grinds to a halt again. Kidman and Day-Lewis' duet by that fountain may be the movie's musical and dramatic low point. We've been given no idea what these characters' past relationship is or what they mean to each other, so her revelation that he's "special to me in my life/ since the first day that I met you" rings no truer than a junior-high yearbook inscription. (Then there's the fact that Kidman has entered some strange phase in her career in which she appears to have been replaced by her own Madame Tussaud's figure. But that's a whole other column.) 
 
 As in Chicago, Marshall's big plan for dynamically transferring the spectacle from stage to screen is to stand in front of a proscenium stage and swoop his camera around. Full-length shots of singing and dancing bodies are rare, and quickly interrupted by edits, as if Marshall is afraid to let us see his cast in action. One of the more effective numbers, "Be Italian," works largely because it tries less hard than the others to be cinematic, and because the Black Eyed Peas' Fergie, playing the village prostitute Saraghina, abounds in the broad, sassy vulgarity the song requires. 
 
 Ultimately, Nine's problem is simple. Translations of stage musicals to the screen rarely work unless the songs are really, really good, and even then, it's tricky. And these songs, with music and lyrics by Maury Yeston, are a far cry from Rodgers and Hart—when I say "Be Italian" is the catchiest song in the score, I'm grading on a serious curve. I wasn't a fan of Marshall's Chicago, with its frantic camerawork and calculated Oscar-seeking behavior, but I can still hum at least three songs from the score. Nine seems unlikely to garner any little gold men, but in a way it already has them. Watching it is like watching six Oscar statuettes interact onscreen. 
 
 
 
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 Slate V: The critics on Nine and other new releases 
 
 Like This Story Follow Slate's Movies ||||| Nine 
 
 December 23, 2009 
 
 My problem may be that I know Fellini's "8½" (1963) too well. Your problem may be that you don't know it well enough. Both of us may be asking, who exactly was "Nine" made for? This is a big-scale version of the 1982 Broadway production, which won the Tony Award as best musical. It's likely that most who saw it had either seen the Fellini film, or made that their business. 
 
 I didn't see it, but I'm sure it greatly benefitted from being live and right there onstage, where the energy in performance compensated for its lack of a single great song. All the songs sound exactly like standard boilerplate Broadway show tunes, except for composer Maury Yestin's "Finale," which evokes the original Nino Rota soundtrack for Fellini, which is the problem. 
 
 
 
 Fellini's great films are essentially musicals. Like most Italian directors of his generation, he didn't record live dialogue and sound. He depended on dubbing. On a set, he usually had an orchestra playing, and asked his actors to move, not in time with the music, but "in sympathy." Everyone in a Fellini film evokes an inner body rhythm. Then there's Rota's music itself, my favorite soundtracks. I could watch a Fellini film on the radio. 
 
 
 
 The story, recycled by Rob Marshall for "Nine," involves aspects of Fellini's own life: his vagueness about screenplays and deadlines, his indifference to budgets, his womanizing, the guilt about sex instilled by his Catholic upbringing, his guilt about cheating on his wife and about bankrupting his producers. It was said that "8½" wasn't so much a confessional as an acting-out of the very problems he was having while making the film, including how to use a gigantic outdoor set he'd constructed for no clear purpose. 
 
 
 
 It's a great film, some say his best. "Nine" the musical "adapts" it, true enough, but doesn't feel it. Consider Fellini's most famous scene. The many women in the life of the hero Guido (played by Marcello Mastroianni) assemble in a fantasy harem and greet him: the Swedish stewardess, his wife, his mistress, his mother, Saraghina the local whore of his childhood and, above all, his muse (Claudia Cardinale), a reassuringly perfect woman, encouraging, never critical. In the harem they caress him, bathe him, soothe him -- and then reveal complaints and criticisms, so that he has to take up a whip and threaten them like a lion tamer. 
 
 
 
 In "Nine" this scene is of course reprised, but with an unclear focus. It's less like a vengeful dream, more like a reunion. There's no urgency, no passion, most of all, no guilt. In fact, the subtext of Catholic guilt, which is central to Fellini, is only hinted at in "Nine." But then "Nine" pays homage to a Broadway musical, and not Fellini at all. 
 
 
 
 In this connection, consider the odd casting of Daniel Day-Lewis in the Fellini/ Mastroianni role, played onstage by Raul Julia. Of course he isn't Guido; who could be? But he also isn't romantic, musical, comic, baffled, exasperated -- and not (even though he apprenticed under a Florentine shoemaker) in the slightest degree Italian. What current movie star could play the role? I think Javier Bardem (Marshall's original choice) could. Gael Garcia Bernal? Maybe Alec Baldwin? You need a man who is handsome and never seems to have given it a thought. I'm crazy? Then you tell me. 
 
 
 
 "Nine" is just plain adrift in its own lack of necessity. It is filled wall to wall with stars (Marion Cotillard as the wife figure, Penelope Cruz as the mistress, Judi Dench as the worrying assistant, Nicole Kidman as the muse, the sublime Sophia Loren as the mother). But that's what they are, stars, because the movie doesn't make them characters. My closing advice is very sincere: In the life of anyone who loves movies, there must be time to see "8½." You can watch it instantly right now on Netflix or Amazon. What are you waiting for? 
 
 
 
 Ebert: "I could watch a Fellini film on the radio": http://j.mp/4Pqjut
– Critics agree: Nine is no 8½. Some enjoy a star-studded song-and-dance, but most don't like the song part, and they find the stars misused at best. Some opinions: "Step right up, pay $10, and you can see eight superstars, six of whom have won Oscars, singing songs in sparkly costumes." If that sounds good, cautions Dana Stevens of Slate, know that "the songs range from mediocre to actively unlistenable and that few of these actors know how to put over a song." Don't take it so seriously, Peter Howell writes in the Toronto Star. It's a "fractured film about creative and coital conundrums that is best sampled like an array of Italian gelatos. In other words, don't complain about how it all works, just enjoy the yummy bits." For Roger Ebert, "Nine is just plain adrift in its own lack of necessity." Sure, it's "filled wall to wall with stars," he writes for the Chicago Sun-Times, " but that's what they are—stars, because the movie doesn't make them characters." Director Rob Marshall "hits more than he misses," writes Peter Travers of Rolling Stone. But at least he's consistent: "Those who hated his music-video editing in Chicago will hate it here."