Lewis is Guido Contini, the agonized director at the center of Federico Fellini's 1963 ode to artistic indecision 8½, and later reincarnated by Arthur Kopit and Maury Yeston for their 1982 musical, which was revived in 2003 (both versions were Tony winners). In a clipped black-and-white intro, Contini plays the hard-to-parse genius for a roomful of reporters. He hides behind his auteurist garb, a cipher in a black suit, thin tie, sunglasses, artfully disheveled hair (the perfectly curly length for running one's hands through in fits of creative frustration), dangling cigarette, and gnomic remarks. The scene is directed and written with spare discipline and acted by Lewis with a wily, knife-sharp sense of humor - fortunately, Marshall comes back to it later in the film, since it is one of the only purely realized elements in the film.
Set in 1965, the conceit of Nine is that Contini, one of Italy's most revered directors, is launching a new film project about which nobody knows anything except the name, Italia. It's a nice, grand title for a film whose central problem is summed up by Contini's longtime costume designer, Lilli (a salty Judi Dench): 'Have you written a word of the script yet?' No matter, as she's already working on the costumes. Plus, sets have started to be built and casting is starting. Contini frets and tries to hide from his producer while the great overgrown machinery of this project grows up around him, the weight of its responsibility further burdened by the constant presence of flashbulb-popping paparazzi and the fact that his last few films were flops.
So, the married Contini deals with this crisis as any good Italian male film character would: he womanizes. When not womanizing, Contini does the next best thing, he fantasizes about women. These fevered imaginings account for the balance of Nine's musical numbers, very few of which make much of an impression. What the playwrights (and Marshall's screenwriters Michael Tolkin and the late Anthony Minghella) do with this musical is essentially take the stark, avant-garde fantasies of 8½ and tart them up with a lot of showgirls in garter belts.
Now, this didn't necessarily have to be a bad thing. Many musicals have made do with much less. But Marshall runs into one crucial problem, which is that Yeston's music and lyrics don't tell a particularly compelling story. There is one exception to this rule, a knockout performance by the singer Fergie, of 'Be Italian,' a sultry, circus-like number which sums up Contini's hangups with women, maturity, and the Church in one fell swoop. Except for that, it's Penelope Cruz (doing solid but unremarkable work as Contini's primary mistress Carla) vamping about, Nicole Kidman (playing Claudia, Contini's pedestal-worshipped muse) crooning with icy distance, and an utterly miscast Kate Hudson doing little of note. Dench registers, as the one companion of Contini's whom he actually seems to listen to, as does a vivid Marion Cotillard, as Contini's finally fed-up wife.
But without the huge, rafter-raising numbers that Marshall brought to hyperactive life in Chicago, and a script that could charitably be described as drifting, he doesn't have much to fall back on. Lewis brings all his considerable powers to bear on his Contini, whose shuffling walk, childlike needs, and evasive verbal maneuverings present a textbook illustration of the solipsistic artiste. But as well-crafted a performance as this is, it's a shout lost amid Nine's meandering mumblings.
