Day 83 -- The Nines

Released: August 31st, 2007

Starring: Ryan Reynolds, Melissa McCarthy, Hope Davis
  
Writer/Director: John August

Description: A troubled actor, a television show runner, and an acclaimed videogame designer find their lives intertwining in mysterious and unsettling ways.

[Review may contain spoilers. Please watch movie before reading, unless you don't care. Most of these films have already been released for a while, so they should be readily available.]

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Films that don't reveal what they are truly about for two/thirds of the movie can either be frustrating or brilliant. M. Night Shyamalan knows both sides of this, with "Six Sense" as the latter and "The Happening" as the former (plants, really?!). No matter how good you set-up the twist, the reveal is all that matters.

"The Nines" has a story that clear and convoluted at the same time. Throughout the films three parts, you get snippets of information about the truth about the world you are watching. The first part is all about an actor having a mental breakdown and slowly begins to realize that he might be in a "Truman Show"-esque situation; Part two is all about a screenwriter who is trying to create a new TV show, and he is also the subject of a reality show. Then, at the end of this section, we are lead to believe that he is in the most boring video game ever. Finally, the third part he plays a video game creator who gets lost in the wood, but by the end of this segment the audience and the character find out that "G" (Reynolds) is a god (get it "G").

The reveal is so clunky that I felt the need to say out loud to no one in particular, 'this is stupid.' The idea of the story is fantastic and on par with inception, but instead of leaving us with just one big question, "The Nines" leaves its audience with many small questions, which makes the ending confusing. Don't misconstrue this as a statement that everything should be spelled out for the audience, but rather, I'm campaigning for writers to know what questions to leave hanging and what ones to answer. You can answer questions and be mysterious, but if you leave too many loose strings, you undermine the entire first two acts of the film.

There are many ways to interpret the story of "The Nines". One is to take it at face value as a film about a god-like being that got too involved in the world he created, or you can take it like I did, as a metaphor for screenwriting. 

Before you roll your eyes, think about it, "G" can change the world with a single thought, and he says that the final world is his 90th, which can be equivalent to a writer's final draft. The two other examples that stick out to me is when "G" mentions to "M" (McCarthy) that the worst scenario, if he stops being involved, is the fiery destruction of the world, which is a reference to what could happen once a screenwriter hands his script over to a director. Finally, the line "S" (Davis) says during his "intervention"spoke to me as a writer, she says, 'If you stay, you'll keep changing the pine cones,' which refers to revision. The process of revision is a hard one because you start agonizing over the most minute details of your script or your world, or as she said, 'the pine cones'.

The performances were uneven. Reynolds only stood out in the middle section, McCarthy was great in the opening scenes, and Davis, and it may just be me, was painful to watch. The inconsistency is the byproduct of having actors play three completely different characters in the course of a 99-minute movie. It's obvious that none of the actors ever got comfortable in their role, and McCarthy especially had a hard time playing herself in the "Reality Television" segment. With all of the different intersecting moments and convolution in the story, the film needed about another half-hour to properly build the characters and clarify the story.

"The Nines" is an interesting idea that was just rushed to fit its run-time. John August did a really good job setting three different tones in each section so that the audience could understand that these were different world. Despite all of the good work he did, his failure to properly pace the reveal is the film's undoing.

Rating: 5/10 -- Inconsistent performances and uneven storytelling mar an otherwise solid film. Reynolds and McCarthy are good, but again, Davis pulls the quality of the film down.