The Weinstein Company

Daniel Day-Lewis is too dry in the role of Italian director Guido. Judi Dench portrays his costumer.

"Nine" opens with Fellini-esque Italian director Guido (Daniel Day-Lewis) lamenting the fragility of the visions he strives to capture on celluloid.

"You kill your film several times, mostly by talking about it. A film is a dream. You kill it writing it down, you kill it with a camera. The film might come to life for a moment or two when your actors breathe life back into it, but then it dies again, buried in film cans." Prophetic words. "Nine" expires in every sluggish, graceless scene.

Based on the 1982 musical about a creatively blocked auteur, the film aspires to be a dark fantasia like Bob Fosse's "All That Jazz" or director Rob Marshall's own "Chicago." But those films follow characters in life-and-death predicaments. Guido's just stuck for an idea.

Day-Lewis hunches his shoulders, crams his fists in his pockets and scowls like Ralph Fiennes passing a kidney stone; his creative crisis comes across as self-glorifying masochistic mush. He's an actor of prodigious gifts but he's on the wrong frequency here, tight and dry in a role that begs for slapstick fury and comic-strip craziness.

Wracking his brain for inspiration, Guido drifts into reveries about the most important women in his life. Enter his superstar muse, his mama, his mistress, an Earth mother from his childhood, his wry costume designer, a predatory reporter and, last and least, his neglected wife. The roles go to a crazy salad of actresses: Judi Dench and Kate Hudson, Fergie and Marion Cotillard, together at last!

Each actress gets an overblown number to convey the nature of her relationship to Il Maestro. The chopped-up editing can't improve set pieces staged like an archaic big-musical circus. The weakly written songs tromp across the screen like a mule team.

Cotillard must inject feeling into "My husband makes movies/To make them he lives a kind of dream/In which his actions aren't always what they seem!" To speak such lines, let alone sing them, would test any actress' mettle.