To the already overcrowded list of year-end disappointments bringing 2009 to a sorry close, you can add Nine. With a legendary Broadway score, director Rob Marshall hoping to repeat his musical Midas touch with Chicago, and an all-star cast that re-defines that overused word fabulous, a lot of Christmas bon-bons were expected from the anticipated movie version of the 1982 Broadway classic. Alas, the movie delivers thistles instead.
The original concept, based on Fellini’s largely autobiographical film 8 and ½ and directed by Tommy Tune, was pure genius. The movie is boring, pretentious, empty, heartless, interminable, cold, and richly flavored as a hard-boiled egg. The basic premise remains the same: A stressed-out director without a single word on paper for his next film, retreats to a spa for a rest cure. One by one, the female muses in his life appear among the white tiles to inspire him, dressed elegantly in black. Let the razzle-dazzle begin. But in the movie, Guido, a director with a phony accent (a hopelessly miscast Daniel Day-Lewis, about as decadently Italian as Mickey Rooney) pushes a cast of thousands all over the place: press conferences, the sound stages of Cinecitta, the Appan Way, the Fountain of Trevi, the Amalfi Coast, and every historic monument in Rome. When he sings, he’s climbing scaffolds like James Bond doing chin-ups. Songs have been dropped and characters added, to no avail. His long-suffering wife (Marion Cotillard), his suicidal mistress (a scantily-clad Penelope Cruz), his butch costume designer (Dame Judi Dench in a wig with Buster Brown bangs the color of doggie-doo), his dead mother (a matronly and badly photographed Sophia Loren, of all people), a neurotic movie star (Nicole Kidman) in a strapless gown wading through fountains, a fat prostitute on the beach (pop diva Fergie) who tried to seduce Guido when he was nine, and enough noisy chorus lines to make you reach for a valium.
They all sing…and sing…and sing! Covered with bling, and not always in tune. Penelope Cruz does an erotically charged number inspired by Jack Cole’s choreography for Marilyn Monroe in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. The musical numbers all look alike, but Dame Judi belts out “Folies Bergere” better than the others, trailing a mile of red feathers. In a senseless role added to the film for no valid reason, a clueless Kate Hudson plays a trashy journalist from Vogue dancing on a runway that looks like a rock video. Busty, porcine Fergie leads a stageful of sluts on a stage full of sand beating a tambourine. Sophia Loren should sue. Doesn’t Rob Marshall know you don’t shoot a woman nearing 80 from under her chin. Because Guido is reaching back inside his brain to pull out memories, real and imagined, the movie plays leap frog with time frames, switching from color to black and white without purpose. Onstage, there was so much glamour I couldn’t decide who to concentrate on. In the movie, they’re so obnoxious I just wanted them to shut up and go home. The movie is busy, but in their failed homage to Fellini, they’ve lost his mystery and humor.
The fragmented script, expanded to include an army of men, now features jealous husbands, nervous producers, doctors with stomach pumps, and hypocritical autograph-collecting Catholic cardinals from the Vatican who ban Guido’s movies but secretly adore the sex scenes. The writers (including director Anthony Minghella, who died before it was finished, which might explain some of the holes) never find the words to deliver Guido from his mid-life crisis and describe the detritus of his messy life. The women who swirl through his dreams would make better studies if they added up to a form of therapy, but the deadly script uses them as nothing more than props. Regrettably, none of the fury and passion that made them so memorable onstage has made its way into this loud but lifeless film spectacle. Without the necessary insight into these flamboyant women a coherent script would provide, you end up caring about none of them. The characters strut and screech and shake their butts in a sexual faux frenzy, but remain then and one-dimensional as cardboard. They knock themselves out cold but it’s like a greatest hits assembly of pop tunes and dirty dancing from floor shows in Atlantic City, inserted to make you forget that nothing else is going on. Nine is giddy, empty-headed and loud, but it never manages to prevent the audience from snoring. A musical train wreck.
In the otherwise somber The Young Victoria, vivacious Emily Blunt, who did so much for stiletto heels in The Devil Wears Prada, puts a modern spin on the famously poised and longest reigning monarch in British history. This is a lavish and lovingly detailed period piece that attempts to recreate England’s last golden age, but the enchanting Ms. Blunt is the whole movie, and it wouldn’t register even a small bleep on the Richter scale without her. She puts the Vicki in the young Victoria.
Born in 1819, she was crowned almost by accident, and never wanted the job. Between her uncle, the mad King William IV, and his three brothers, they produced only one heir to the throne who lived beyond puberty, so Victoria had no choice but to find herself crowned at a tender age, knowing nothing of the world swirling outside the walls of Kensington Palace. For a spirited child, it was a prison replete with food tasters to protect her from assassins and endless lectures on protocol from her stern, social climbing mother, the Duchess of Kent (Miranda Richardson), and her villainous, politically ambitious advisor, Sir John Conroy (Mark Strong). Denied even the briefest privacy, she was used as a pawn in the animosity between her uncles, the loony William (Jim Broadbent) and Leopold, the King of the Belgians (Thomas Kretschmann), which resulted in an arranged marriage with Prince Albert of Germany (Rupert Friend). The communion took—gradually at first, through their love of Bellini operas and the novels of Sir Walter Scott, and then grew with trust and a shared understanding of loneliness in the public eye. Once they are together under the same roof the movie is over, but not the running time. The second half is a romance novel brought to life, with glittering balls, another scheming palace puppetmaster (Paul Bettany) working hard to destroy Prince Albert in Victoria’s eyes, and a coronation ceremony in a computer-generated Westminster Abbey. Despite the odds, the royal couple established a bond, clashing with Parliament over their views on welfare, housing, and education. The movie is not only about a liberal, headstrong princess who would not be controlled, rising above her youth and inexperience to win the heart of the man she loved and eventually the people she ruled, but also about how Prince Albert learned to find his own place of importance in the court. The movie should really be called Victoria and Albert. They reigned together 20 years, until Albert died at 42. Queen Victoria died at 81, in 1900.
Moving the action from dreary old Windsor Castle, with its tapestries and mahogany staircases, to a newly constructed Buckingham Palace, flooded with sunlight and gold-leaf crown moldings, French-Canadian director Jean-Marc Vallee gets the pomp and pageantry right, but reveals little insight into the qualities that turned Victoria into the beloved and enduring monarch she later became. What a shame the movie is only about her youth. The most intriguing part of her rule was after Albert’s death, when his widow led England into the industrial revolution in the 1880s—a colorful time of teeming Whitechapel slums, factory- smoke fog, Dickensian derelicts, Oscar Wilde decadence, the Elephant Man, and Jack the Ripper (who, according to one popular theory, was suspected to be Queen Victoria’s own son, the Duke of Clarence). Julian Fellowes’ script doesn’t get to the good stuff, and reveals nothing about her personal or family life. It’s hard to sift through the numerous palace intrigues. Some of the actors speak with accents thick as gravy. The music is intrusive, overpowering every scene, and there’s even a soapy song by Sinead O’Connor under the end credits called “Only You—Love Theme from The Young Victoria” that sounds like an audition for one of those Oscar night horrors staged in a cloud of smoke with costumed dancers in white wigs waving candelabras.
At times like these, I was doubly grateful for Emily Blunt. From the coins, stamps and cameos sold in London curio shops, the impression of Queen Victoria has always been starchy and dour. Ms. Blunt provides the charm and charisma to give an old-fashioned profile a welcome contemporary appeal.
Jeff Bridges is not aging well, but when he stopped shaving he started acting. The acting shows in Crazy Heart, an otherwise boring slice of country fried steak with an exceptional performance by the gravel-voiced good old boy that raises the film several notches in the direction of unforgettable.
Bad Blake, a once-famous western singing attraction now reduced to one-night gigs in bowling alleys, drives his truck into Santa Fe, pours out his urine from a gallon milk jug, slugs down enough whiskey to float a cargo ship, and leaves the stage in the middle of his show to vomit into a garbage can. The next morning he rolls his gut out of bed and hits the road again, leaving a haggard fan behind in the motel sheets. It’s a routine he knows by heart. Moaning in an inaudible croak like a cross between Tom Waits and Harvey Fierstein, he’s a sort of first cousin to Robert Duvall’s Oscar-winning role in Tender Mercies, a 1983 movie that was also about a down-for-the-count country singer trying to put the broken pieces of his wasted life back together. (Mr. Duvall produced Crazy Heart and plays a Houston bartender in it.) But Tender Mercies was supported on the literary columns of an Oscar-winning screenplay by Horton Foote, who knew how to take his time and examine his characters with a flashlight to the soul. When Crazy Heart takes its time, it’s more like stretching a short story into a feature film. Well directed but sketchily written by actor Scott Cooper, the film relies a great deal on the star to flesh out what is only implied. It’s a lot of work, but Mr. Bridges is merely miraculous.
A 57-year-old has-been who is slowly killing himself with alcohol and cigarettes, Bad Blake is also a variation on the revolting creep Mr. Bridges played in The Big Lebowski, as well as the white bearded, pot-bellied version of the freak in The Men Who Stare at Goats. The once handsome, clean-cut embodiment of reliable Hollywood aristocracy has just about got a patent on stumble-bum reprobates. Bad Blake refuses to reveal his real name or discuss his four failed marriages, but he’s impressed enough with the pretty young reporter (Maggie Gyllenhaal) who comes to interview him after one of his shows that he takes her to bed, befriends her little boy, and thinks maybe he’s finally found the girl who could mean more to him than another meaningless one-night stand. But first, he’s got a trying gig in Las Vegas as the opening act for his arch nemesis Tommy Sweet (a miscast, unconvincing Colin Farrell). A lot of guitar plunking Nashville crooning ensues, followed by a life-altering decision that could change his future. What happens in the 111 minutes of Crazy Heart can be written on the head of a bobby pin, but there’s no arguing about the sweet impact of the central performance.
Whether you like the film or not depends on how much you like hillbilly music and Jeff Bridges. He’s pretty dog-eared and over the fence by now, but he sings the original songs with real conviction, and there’s something about him as down home as a bowl of grits with sawmill gravy. Anyone who remembers his father Lloyd Bridges with legendary Kim Stanley in both The Goddess and John Frankenheimer’s “Playhouse 90” production of Clifford Odets’ Clash by Night knows he comes from great acting genes. Lonely but aloof, talented but self-destructive, desperate for roots but a victim of his own addictive demons, his performance as Bad Blake leaves no shadowy corner of a complex life unexplored. He’s aging like a sweaty, chain-smoking King Lear.