Nine

In 2005 director Rob Marshall had a runaway hit with his film version of the Broadway musical "Chicago." Let's hope he enjoyed it. If a Broadway musical loosely based on Federico Fellini's 1963 deconstructionist masterpiece "8 1/2" sounds like a recipe for disaster, it is. As if 2009 needed one more nine-related movie title--we've already suffered through "$9.99," "District 9," "Cloud 9," and the animated travesty "9"--Marshall and his crew run through every musical set-piece as though checking off a list that leads to the grave. Where "8 1/2" captured the zeitgeist of '60s Italian tedium, "Nine" is a self-conscious, wrongheaded attempt at riding Fellini's coattails with musical numbers that fawn over every Italian cultural touchstone satirized by the original. "Nine" is constructed around Daniel Day-Lewis's knock-off of Marcello Mastroianni's Guido Anselmi (here the Fellini alter-ego is named Guido Contini). The seven muses in Guido's rudderless life each get a chance to sing and dance their reason for existence, namely their love of Guido. As Guido's haughty mother Sophia Loren strikes museum-quality poses, Stacy Ferguson (a.k.a. Fergie) goes hog wild as a half-remembered and half-dressed nymphomaniac from Guido's childhood. Penelope Cruz, Nicole Kidman, and Marion Cotillard attempt to out-hot one another in steamy routines filmed with clinical precision. By trying to reconstitute the essence of Fellini during a crucial period of artistic anxiety, the writers of "Nine" have missed the point entirely. Bad enough that such a mockery was presented on Broadway, but now there's a film that mocks Fellini's genius with confused reverence for his seminal work. Daniel Day-Lewis's weak embodiment of Marcello Mastroianni is disconnected from what should have been a man with too much imagination. Very sad.

Rated PG-13. 118 mins. (C) (Two Stars)