Nine

No one buying a ticket to Nine expects it to be a musical equivalent of the masterwork that inspired it—8½, Federico Fellini’s towering, visionary and lacerating self-portrait of an acclaimed movie director grappling with a crippling creative crisis...we hope, anyway. Boasting a starry cast that includes Daniel Day-Lewis, Penelope Cruz, Sophia Loren, Marion Cottilard, Nicole Kidman, Kate Hudson, Judi Dench and Fergie, Nine is, of course, director Rob Marshall’s movie version of the much-loved and revived Tony-winning 1982 Broadway musical. The stage production was a lot of things, but another 8½ it wasn’t—and neither is the film version. In fact, it’s even a long way from Marshall's Oscar-winning Chicago, although it occasionally goes in for some of the same tawdry glitter, along with dollops of Cabaret, All That Jazz and even Stephen Sondheim’s legendary Follies.

Set in La Dolce Vita-style 1960s Italy, Nine is a flashy, fantastic-looking, surface-obsessed movie notable for big production numbers of good-to-so-so songs, a couple of memorable performances, lots of sexy chorus girls whiplashing their wigs and many missed opportunities. As the charismatic, self-obsessed Fellini surrogate circled by women he thinks he loves but mostly abuses, Daniel Day-Lewis looks great, strikes matador poses, runs his hands through hair a lot and puts over his song reasonably well—but with so much of the film’s running time spent on choreographed hip-thrusting and coochy-coo, the star doesn’t quite score the knockout intended. Marion Cottilard, as the director’s soulful wife, gets to go for the throat in two showy songs while wily Penelope Cruz generates heat and pathos in her role as the director’s mistress.

Although the movie wastes Sophia Loren as the hero’s saintly mother, Stacie “Fergie” Ferguson, playing one of Fellini’s she-wolf whores, blows the roof off in her show-stopping big number; very British costume designer Judi Dench turns inexplicably Parisian in a Folies Bergere turn; Nicole Kidman brings melancholy-laced movie star pizzazz to her role as the director’s muse; and provocative Vogue journalist Kate Hudson shakes what mama Goldie Hawn gave her in a spangly production number that, ironically, celebrates almost everything Fellini satirized. Nine may be chain restaurant Italian compared with Fellini’s five-course feasts from the heart of Rome, but it’s extravagant, sexy and spilling over with razzle-dazzle.