This is the first year that I have participated in Stinky Lulu's Supporting Actress Blogathon. I am a bit late to the game, and only decided to jump in because nobody seemed to be giving any love to the ladies of Nine.
I can understand it in a way. There is something a little overwhelming about the actresses in Nine. It's Kidman! Cruz! Dench! Cotillard! La Loren! Hudson ( she doesn't get an exclamation point because apart from her amazing work in Almost Famous she has done anything lately to deserve it). Where do you start?
Nine is an odd beast – a film which is intermittently wonderful but never really coheres to be the mighty dramatic musical that it wants to be. In a film filled with problems (the majority of which can be attributed directly to Rob Marshall), the complete hollow center that is Day-Lewis' character and performance is ultimately the biggest hurdle. Everything is geared towards his grand dramatic solo at the end of this film, but it fails utterly to resonate.
But there are two actresses that are practically perfect – two examples of titanic supporting work that could be frozen and preserved in the Smithsonian as specimens for future generations. Both Penelope Cruz and Marion Cotillard end up shouldering the real emotional weight of the film, and do so with such grace and skill that they pierce through Marshall's over-designed set and frantic editing to give substance and weight to the entire film.
Cruz has a role which on paper is nothing but stereotype. She's a fiery Latina! She's sexy! She's emotionally unstable! She is given some appalling lines (the vagina line just made me cringe). But in a similar vein to her work on Vicky Christina Barcelona, Cruz takes these elements and imbues them with an earthy sensuality, a kittenish flair for comedy and ultimately, a bruised sense of abandonment that elevate the character into something palpable and heart-breaking. If you had told me fie years ago that Cruz would become one of my favourite actors, I would have laughed. I thought she was terrible in most of her American films. But starting around the time of Volver, she seemed to finally figure out precisely how to use her gifts as a performer and Nine is like a mini-culmination of this – a greatest hits package of what she is capable of. To go from the insanely sexy romp of A Call to the Vatican, to the single desolate shot of her stumbling from the hotel after being humiliated by Guido is to see an actress working at the height of her powers.
In a similar vein, Cotillard is playing a 'type' – the wronged, long-suffering wife. It's tough to imagine how much there is left to be mined in this particular trope and yet she makes it seem fresh and vibrant What Cotillard has going for her is that she is one of the strongest technical singers in the cast. She has such a beautiful, pure voice, and obviously knows precisely how to use it so her two songs come off as master-classes in how an entire scene, and a whole history of pain, can be contained in just three or four minutes of screentime. The only moment where Marshall manages to balance his conceit of singing in a conceptual limbo and cross-cutting to a dramatic scene is in Cotillard's final number Take it All. The switching between her brilliant, impassioned singing and the quieter, but no-less potent fury in her scene with Day-Lewis is an excellent example of what the film could have been if Marshall had been more adventurous with the material. Cotillard isn't in much of the movie – she has a handful of scenes in total. Though she has been promoted as lead, its actually a prime example of superb actressing at the edges. Like Cruz, the film works brilliantly whenever she is on screen.
To read other entries in the blogathon, including the overlooked ladies of An Education (Olivia Williams and Rosamund Pike), and my personal favourite Anna Kendrick from Up in the Air, visit StinkyLulu's site
