Can you hear a sort of whooshing and gurgling? That is the sound of Daniel Day-Lewis flushing his mystique down the toilet

• Peter Bradshaw
• guardian.co.uk, Thursday 17 December 2009 22.30 GMT

 

 

Listen: can you hear a sort of whooshing and gurgling? That is the sound of Daniel Day-Lewis flushing his mystique down the toilet. He has mystifyingly taken the non-singing lead in a musical that is hideously naff, shallow, creepingly misogynist, badly acted and as phoney as a three-lire bill.

It is adapted from a 1980s Broadway musical, which in turn was loosely based on Fellini's classic 8½, about a movie director suffering from creative crisis and beset by anxieties and memories. Every scintilla of Fellini's subversion, anarchy and brilliance is utterly expunged by this crass dinner-theatre treatment, directed by Rob Marshall in the same unvarying and strident way he made Chicago.

Daniel Day-Lewis has a silly Italian-a accent-a, playing the great film-maker, surrounded by the women-a in his life-a. These are Penélope Cruz as the mistress, Marion Cotillard as the wife, Nicole Kidman as the leading lady, Judi Dench as the sharp-tongued confidante and - oh, Dio - stately Sophia Loren as the ghostly visitation of his dead mum. There is plenty of dubious pseudo-celebration of women, which masks a tacky and fastidious condescension.

As for Day-Lewis himself, how could he do this to us? Only by taking the lead in a remake of Sex Lives of the Potato Men could he disillusion us any more. The method acting king! The paragon of serious technique! The guy who supposedly doesn't just take any old silly role! And the man who has actually lived in Italy and has presumably met-a real-a Italians-a! To quote the title of a well-known film, Mr Day-Lewis, Mamma Mia!

condescension - protekcjonalność

crass - prymitywny, ordynarny

expunged - wymazany, wykreślony

fastidious - wybredny, wymagający

gurgling - bulgotanie

naff - bez gustu

paragon - wzór

phoney - fałszywy

strident - przeraźliwy, gwałtowny, ostry

tacky - tandetny

whooshing - świst

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