Review: The Nines
A trio of actors -- Ryan Reynolds, Hope Davis, Melissa McCarthy -- star in three segments, numbers which equal nine when multiplied. John August's directing debut is called The Nines, though I'm hard pressed to explain the connection. The importance of the number is cleverly played with throughout the film.
Segment number one, The Prisoner, is the most successful of the three parts. Ryan Reynolds plays a famous TV actor in the midst of a breakdown, confined to house arrest in Los Angeles; Hope Davis has fun with the role of the demented housewife next door, and Melissa McCarthy is his cheery but domineering publicist. It's an entertaining, well-played scenario, which includes arson, baby monitors, and crack binges.
But then Ryan is transformed into a gay television writer and finally a sweater-wearing family man who designs video games. Davis becomes an untrustworthy TV producer and then -- completely over the top -- a mad hippie hiker. McCarthy goes on to play a TV actress and the contented wife of Ryan Reynolds and mother of a mute Elle Fanning. There are an awful lot of television references in this feature film. The loose threads holding The Nines together unravel with any interpretation; actually, the film only ever felt stitched together in the first place. 2 stars. The Nines opened on Friday. [Posted by Marcy.]
Comments
Although it might look like it and it often read in critics and comments, I do not think that this is a movie made up of three more or less successful episodes! If the central part seems to be the second where the writer is hard into schizofrenia imagining that a team is making a movie about his TV series making, that character should be seen as “one” character, namely the creator whom, on this occasion, is also a character that is himself created!
The movie is essentially metaphysical or rather and more simply a film about creation and its trauma. How can the creator distinguish the reality of creation and what he or she creates? There is a point when this is not possible anymore..where the two are so confounded that the creator cuts the intimate link between him and the products of hsi imagination and stops creating.
“He won’t come back” says the child-actress or actress-child at the end of the movie. But who is not coming back? The father-character, Gabriel, the ctor who impersonates him or, more cogently, the charactersm any character, that the creator, invisible but everpresent, creates? Or the creator himself is the one who disappears, the one who can’t anymore stand the burden and the anxiety of creation?
Through the different characters of the movie we go in fact through the drama of creation, but not only of the creator behind the scenes in the novie, but ALL creators who may feel overwhelmed by the product of their own creation.
However, beyond the drama, beyond the apparent annihilation of the creative power, the creator comes back and is there to tell us the story, to tell us in fact the story of his dispair and in doing that he comes to life again!
This is real matter to think about for anyone of us who ever thought he could be an artist!