The Nines
Directed by Oliver Hirschbie John August
Sardonic Ryan Reynolds playing a fatuous Hollywood actor in The Nines is the sharpest, subtlest satire of a California stereotype since Evan Rachel Woods’ high school glamour girl in the too-little-seen Pretty Persuasion (a comic conceit so deadly accurate it flew beneath the media’s radar). Perfectly named Gary, Reynolds’ gymmed and blond-dyed image presents a commercially sexy but morally hollow shell. Gary’s deepest thoughts are misnomers—“negnativity” and “purgatorium.”
Then, in the second of the film’s three parts, Reynolds switches into a bull’s-eye impersonation of another insecure, Hollywood creative type—a TV writer-producer perfectly named Gavin who is gay, conceited and a slave to his own ambition. Reynolds plays Gavin as the flipside of Gary’s unexamined liberty—the twin sell-out of a soulless doll.
But Reynolds’ third character, Gabriel, is where The Nines goes unfunny. The fault isn’t Reynolds’, but that of writer/director John August. In the last of The Nines’ three acts, August overcomplicates his witty concept—garbles it, really—and leaves Reynolds, the best comic actor since Jim Carrey, in the dumps, where all pretentious Hollywood deep thoughts go.
It’s strange to complain about a rare case of ambitious Hollywood filmmaking, but The Nines frustrates one’s enlightenment by not fulfilling its true subject: the delusions and aggravations of company-town high living. Instead, August substitutes false substance. Reynolds’ gift for cute mischief (as in National Lampoon’s Van Wilder and his role as the snarky vampire of Blade Trinity) ideally suits him to a parody of movieland’s pretty persuasions. Flip irony is Reynolds’ ace, but August chooses to play the profundity card.
August burdens Reynolds (and us) with Gabriel, a computer game designer who may himself be a viral figment, a fictional TV character or God. The non-real role opposes Reynolds’ other two characters who reflected a social and cultural reality. But Gabriel is a TV scam—a half-baked idea that fails to enhance the previous segments.
It’s obvious that August is trying for something meaningful: His three acts (titled “Prisoner,” “Reality Television” and “Knowing”) question the Hollywood lifestyles that usually go unquestioned except in probing classics like The Player and Mulholland Drive. August starts with a convincing Hollywood insider drama that’s more realistic than The Dying Gaul’s loathsome debauch (just as his three-part, time-shifting script for the 1997 Go was more believable than its model, Pulp Fiction). He has a knack for everyday comic absurdity—such as an a cappella performance of Peggy Lee’s “Is That All There Is” turning into a manic, surreal seduction skit. Unfortunately, August’s taste for grandiloquent mystery and surface complexity pushes The Nines into territory as exasperating and unrewarding as David Lynch’s Hollywood fantasy Inland Empire.
The Nines attempts a metaphysical folly about Hollywood skeptics (Gary wears a green yarn Kabbalah bracelet). But failure to articulate his characters’ obsessive, unfocussed ideas is symptomatic of a faithless, non-thinking age. Too bad The Nines, with its numerological red herrings, opens so soon after the deaths of Michelangelo Antonioni and Ingmar Bergman—great filmmakers who devoted their art to pondering faith; their styles penetrated the modern world’s confusion. Antonioni’s questioning in The Red Desert was fecund; The Nines is arid.
Not only is Reynolds hampered by August’s pretenses, but two good actresses also sink into his abyss: Melissa McCarthy, who plays Margaret/Melissa/Mary in the three segments, and Hope Davis, who portrays Sarah/Susan/Sierra. Each achieves moments of charm and spite. The plump, appealing McCarthy goes from bullying publicist to vulnerable actress to TV-wife with an identity crisis; Davis shows how a Hollywood hausfrau, network executive and suspicious TV guest-star can be aspects of the same anxious woman.
Davis is probably the most consistent of the three tours de force (ah-ha—the nines!). She reveals more of what fascinates and scares August about Hollywood denizens while Reynolds and McCarthy tease his likes. It is Davis who rouses the story’s most startling moment: She provokes Gavin to interpersonal violence (male-female co-worker aggression) that is more extreme and scarily credible than any depicted in a Hollywood movie since the Coke bottle scene in The Long Goodbye.
In The Nines’ media kit, August refers to Reynolds, McCarthy and Davis’ roles as G, M and S—invoking Alain Resnais’ codified characters in the magnificent Last Year at Marienbad. But look how far August has come from those great ’60s cinematic experiments that moved viewers to examine their own lives. I can’t report whether August and his cinematographer Nancy Schreiber attain the supernal visual aesthetics of Red Desert or Marienbad since The Nines was screened for critics in ugly, pixilated digi-beta video. It matters—or has Hollywood’s philosophical decline succumbed to the artistic wasteland of mumblecore?
Directed by Oliver Hirschbie John August
Sardonic Ryan Reynolds playing a fatuous Hollywood actor in The Nines is the sharpest, subtlest satire of a California stereotype since Evan Rachel Woods’ high school glamour girl in the too-little-seen Pretty Persuasion (a comic conceit so deadly accurate it flew beneath the media’s radar). Perfectly named Gary, Reynolds’ gymmed and blond-dyed image presents a commercially sexy but morally hollow shell. Gary’s deepest thoughts are misnomers—“negnativity” and “purgatorium.”
Then, in the second of the film’s three parts, Reynolds switches into a bull’s-eye impersonation of another insecure, Hollywood creative type—a TV writer-producer perfectly named Gavin who is gay, conceited and a slave to his own ambition. Reynolds plays Gavin as the flipside of Gary’s unexamined liberty—the twin sell-out of a soulless doll.
But Reynolds’ third character, Gabriel, is where The Nines goes unfunny. The fault isn’t Reynolds’, but that of writer/director John August. In the last of The Nines’ three acts, August overcomplicates his witty concept—garbles it, really—and leaves Reynolds, the best comic actor since Jim Carrey, in the dumps, where all pretentious Hollywood deep thoughts go.
It’s strange to complain about a rare case of ambitious Hollywood filmmaking, but The Nines frustrates one’s enlightenment by not fulfilling its true subject: the delusions and aggravations of company-town high living. Instead, August substitutes false substance. Reynolds’ gift for cute mischief (as in National Lampoon’s Van Wilder and his role as the snarky vampire of Blade Trinity) ideally suits him to a parody of movieland’s pretty persuasions. Flip irony is Reynolds’ ace, but August chooses to play the profundity card.
August burdens Reynolds (and us) with Gabriel, a computer game designer who may himself be a viral figment, a fictional TV character or God. The non-real role opposes Reynolds’ other two characters who reflected a social and cultural reality. But Gabriel is a TV scam—a half-baked idea that fails to enhance the previous segments.
It’s obvious that August is trying for something meaningful: His three acts (titled “Prisoner,” “Reality Television” and “Knowing”) question the Hollywood lifestyles that usually go unquestioned except in probing classics like The Player and Mulholland Drive. August starts with a convincing Hollywood insider drama that’s more realistic than The Dying Gaul’s loathsome debauch (just as his three-part, time-shifting script for the 1997 Go was more believable than its model, Pulp Fiction). He has a knack for everyday comic absurdity—such as an a cappella performance of Peggy Lee’s “Is That All There Is” turning into a manic, surreal seduction skit. Unfortunately, August’s taste for grandiloquent mystery and surface complexity pushes The Nines into territory as exasperating and unrewarding as David Lynch’s Hollywood fantasy Inland Empire.
The Nines attempts a metaphysical folly about Hollywood skeptics (Gary wears a green yarn Kabbalah bracelet). But failure to articulate his characters’ obsessive, unfocussed ideas is symptomatic of a faithless, non-thinking age. Too bad The Nines, with its numerological red herrings, opens so soon after the deaths of Michelangelo Antonioni and Ingmar Bergman—great filmmakers who devoted their art to pondering faith; their styles penetrated the modern world’s confusion. Antonioni’s questioning in The Red Desert was fecund; The Nines is arid.
Not only is Reynolds hampered by August’s pretenses, but two good actresses also sink into his abyss: Melissa McCarthy, who plays Margaret/Melissa/Mary in the three segments, and Hope Davis, who portrays Sarah/Susan/Sierra. Each achieves moments of charm and spite. The plump, appealing McCarthy goes from bullying publicist to vulnerable actress to TV-wife with an identity crisis; Davis shows how a Hollywood hausfrau, network executive and suspicious TV guest-star can be aspects of the same anxious woman.
Davis is probably the most consistent of the three tours de force (ah-ha—the nines!). She reveals more of what fascinates and scares August about Hollywood denizens while Reynolds and McCarthy tease his likes. It is Davis who rouses the story’s most startling moment: She provokes Gavin to interpersonal violence (male-female co-worker aggression) that is more extreme and scarily credible than any depicted in a Hollywood movie since the Coke bottle scene in The Long Goodbye.
In The Nines’ media kit, August refers to Reynolds, McCarthy and Davis’ roles as G, M and S—invoking Alain Resnais’ codified characters in the magnificent Last Year at Marienbad. But look how far August has come from those great ’60s cinematic experiments that moved viewers to examine their own lives. I can’t report whether August and his cinematographer Nancy Schreiber attain the supernal visual aesthetics of Red Desert or Marienbad since The Nines was screened for critics in ugly, pixilated digi-beta video. It matters—or has Hollywood’s philosophical decline succumbed to the artistic wasteland of mumblecore?
