It’s hard to see Nine as anything other than a retreat of sorts for director Rob Marshall. He followed up his Oscar-feted Chicago–a film you may recall that I quite like–with an attempt to branch out into prestige fare that doesn’t involve toe-tapping numbers. The result was 2005’s Memoirs of a Geisha, a film that inspired yawning indifference. So it’s back to the musicals, bringing the early-eighties Tony-winner Nine to the screen. A song-and-dance reworking of Federico Fellini’s 8 1/2, it’s a notable enough work that it enjoyed a relatively well received revival in the past few years, but I do wonder if the original show sits in the pantheon of Broadway productions for anything more notable the costume Anita Morris wore in it.

As evidenced by the film version, there’s little to get excited about in the songs by Maury Yeston. This is about as plodding and uninspired a batch of tunes as one could imagine. Nearly every offering is lacking in wit or wiles. They don’t move along the plot or add depth to the characters. They’re just there providing about as much added context to the greater work as the step-up-and-sing offerings on an average night of American Idol. The only reaction they might provoke is a wince or two, especially if it’s one the new numbers written for the film like the painfully dippy “Cinema Italiano,” which sounds and is staged as if it were lifted whole from some aborted Austin Powers sequel. It’s perhaps a mark of how clumsy and out-of-step Marshall is in his efforts this time out that that’s the song he chooses to bring back to kick off the closing credits, making the terrible misjudgment of sending the audience out the door with a reminder of the film’s weakest moment ringing through the surround sound.

Marshall is all over the place. Considering he’s assembled no less than six Oscar winners to fill out his cast, it’s remarkable how little they’re given to do. This could have been presented as a bare-bones revue with little discernible impact, the stars perched on stools in their street clothes on an otherwise empty stage, reciting their lines and singing their songs while staring down at their folded-over scripts. Judging by how much more interesting the “rehearsal montage” teaser trailer is than anything else that ended up the finished product, it probably would have been significantly better. During the musical numbers Marshall always seems to have the camera in the wrong place, crushing in on the dancing when scope is what’s needed, pulling back to the widest of wide shots when tightening on in the intricacies of the movement would be better. For one of the few songs with any verve, “Be Italian,” delivered here by Fergie and a striding chorus of torn-stocking harlots, Marshall sets his camera rolling around behind some set dressing in the foreground, perhaps mimicking the sight-line of innocent boys peeping at the exotic prostitutes from behind some beachfront rocks, but absolutely obscuring the performance.

In some respects, this film was also going to be an enormous challenges. Even putting aside the debatable merits of the original musical, it was always going to work easier on stage than in a film format, where the Fellini film inspiration is going to loom large. A musical version of Casablanca might be cute on the Broadway boards (“So sad to see that plane depart/But a beautiful friendship is about to start”), but bringing it the format of the story’s greatest triumph is going to invite some daunting comparisons. And so it is for Nine, where the dreamlike wonder of its predecessor only emphasizes the awkwardness of the transitions between the more concrete story of a Lothario, creatively blocked Italian director and the musical numbers that, presumably, exist mostly in his mind. The whole endeavor feels rushed. Edges haven’t been smoothed out, problems haven’t been fixed. It’s a show that needs a few more weeks of trial and error before opening night. There’s no such option, though. On film, the flaws live forever.

(Posted simultaneously to “Jelly-Town!”)