Nine Months (1995) – DVD

*/**** Image B+ Sound B
starring Hugh Grant, Julianne Moore, Tom Arnold, Joan Cusack
screenplay by Chris Columbus, based on the film Neuf mois by Patrick Braoude
directed by Chris Columbus

by Walter Chaw That Chris Columbus consistently gets opportunities to direct films in Hollywood is not a result of his talent or wit, but rather the American box-office’s indefatigable hunger for empty cinematic calories. When such unforgivably unpleasant and sentimental Columbus pap as Home Alone, Home Alone 2, Mrs. Doubtfire, Only the Lonely, and Stepmom drop like lead balloons into the cineplex to the approving chorus of the terminally uncritical and the incurably dim-witted, there is no possible reason for studios to try to create something of quality and value. Psst! Wanna make a fortune? Toss a cheap and manipulative tearjerker peppered with mean-spirited slapstick to Chris Columbus, and watch the money pour in.

People shocked that the hack Columbus was tabbed to direct the eagerly awaited Harry Potter film need understand only that the hyphenate’s golden talent is his ability to make everything he touches exactly the same and, as that “sameness” is a known and lucrative commodity, a safe investment. Nowhere is the evidence of Columbus’s cynical longevity and unusual lack of cleverness more apparent than in the predominantly loathsome gender comedy Nine Months. That it is actually worse than the similarly themed Junior and She’s Having a Baby (directed by Columbus’s mentor John Hughes) speaks volumes of the depths Nine Months dredges for inspiration. The film alternates schizophrenically between overly sentimental romantic melodrama, tiresome He Said, She Said polemics, and Home Alone-esque physical comedy–none of which actually works independently, much less together.

Samuel Faulkner (Hugh Grant) is a child therapist who appears to have neither an understanding of, nor a trace of empathy for, actual children. As the movie opens, Samuel’s long-term girlfriend Rebecca (Julianne Moore) announces to him that she’s pregnant. Samuel’s horror results in Rebecca leaving him, which results in Samuel having a schmaltzy moment of growth, which results in their unlikely reconciliation. If you think I’m giving something away, this is obviously the first film you’ve ever seen. Pity that you’ve started with this one.

To lend comic tension (and because convention demands it), there will be an earthy blue-collar couple to lend their earthy blue-collar advice to the lead couple (European Vacation), a wacky ethnic doctor/wedding planner to be laughed at by the white upper crust (Father of the Bride), and a series of discordant slapstick sequences that are as disturbing as they are lacklustre.

Gail (Joan Cusack in Runaway Bride mode) and Marty (Tom Arnold) are said blue-collar couple. In one of recent memory’s more preposterous meet-cutes, they somehow introduce themselves by striking Samuel with a kite on the beach. It comes as little surprise that Gail and Marty are the sister and brother-in-law to Samuel’s best friend, Sean (Jeff Goldblum); more dismaying is Samuel’s apparent ignorance that his best friend has a sister and brother-in-law named Gail and Marty. He doesn’t know, you see, so that there can be a comedic double-take when he figures it out (about 30 minutes after we have). Nine Months believes its audience is so stupid that it also tries to get laughs from an obstetric examination table that bucks and spins madly under the clumsy hand of a ridiculous foreigner with nary an explanation for what possible function a “wild bronco” button would serve on a medical gurney. Or on anything.

Longtime Columbus collaborator Robin Williams–he also starred in Columbus’s Bicentennial Man and Mrs. Doubtfire–lends his dubious talents as this Russian veterinarian-turned-obstetrician, who spews ridiculous malapropisms (“Now ve must examine ze woman’s volvo”) that everyone in the film seems too blind to understand, and too crass to forgive. Consider a delivery-room moment in which our poor Dr. Kosevich tries desperately to find the word for “epidural” by trying out “epidermis.” That a maternity ward occupied by two pregnant women, their husbands (one of whom is expecting his fourth offspring), a small team of nurses, and an anesthesiologist are unable to understand that “epidermis” is being used in place of “epidural” is patently ridiculous, deeply insulting, and aggressively unfunny. Most unfortunate is probably Williams’s decision to fuse his caricature of a Russian national from Moscow on the Hudson with his troubled doctor cameo from Dead Again.

Hugh Grant, bearing a shocking resemblance to ’30s child star Freddie Bartholomew, takes his stammering, British Ben Stiller shtick farther than it can be stretched, until he finds himself completely out of his element. He’s forced here to fight both a giant dinosaur mascot and a man in a praying mantis suit. Columbus’s cupboard is so bare that rather than capitalize on Grant’s ability to be a wonderfully expressive straight man, he asks the decidedly slight Brit to engage in a series of broad comic moments: the aforementioned cartoon fight sequences, a ridiculous car ride through town with a wife in labour and a growing passenger list of people he injures along the way, and a few scuffles with Tom Arnold. Who, admittedly, deserves to get punched.

Julianne Moore shows off her extremely limited range, rotating her sparse selection of expressions (bleary-eyed joy, red-eyed fuming, and teary-eyed screeching) in a fashion tedious after about five minutes. Moore has been inexplicably hailed as our next great actress, but she can neither choose good films nor suitable roles with any kind of intelligence or regularity. Our next great actress is Cate Blanchett–Moore, lamentably, appears to be merely the best that the United States can offer.

Any good performances in Nine Months, and there aren’t any (Goldblum, Arnold, Cusack, and Williams all desperately need a strong director, and none of them find one in Columbus), would be subsumed by the stultification of Columbus’s script, itself based upon a bad French comedy called Neuf mois. The track record for adapting French films is not a pretty one (Cousins, Three Men and a Baby, Point of No Return, Sommersby, and Roxanne, to name a few), and Nine Months is perhaps the worst of them.

There is the potential, I suppose, for a good film to be squeezed from the John Gray school of sexual misunderstanding, but not only is Chris Columbus ill-suited to helm it, he is also ill-suited to helm any motion picture. Nine Months is exactly the movie that Home Alone and Mrs. Doubtfire are: manipulative, cheap, schmaltzy, pratfall-prone, and moronic. There’s clearly an audience for this pabulum, most likely a middle-aged one, lending credence to the idea that the educational system isn’t actually getting worse but has been bad for an awfully long time.

THE DVD
The DVD transfer of Nine Months is presented by Fox Video in crisp anamorphic widescreen (2.35:1), with an underutilized Dolby 5.1 track that gets occasional workout largely from repeated swellings of an overheated orchestral score by Hans Zimmer. Colours and edges are well-delineated; if Chris Columbus movies are anything, they are glossy.

Special features consist entirely of film and television trailers, three theatrical (one in French), and three TV spots that are adequately transferred in full-screen–each, it almost goes without saying, better than what they advertise. The sparsely augmented DVD is rounded out by theatrical trailers to other bad films (For the Boys, The Truth About Cats and Dogs, Norma Rae, 9 to 5, Working Girl), a French dub, and English and Spanish subtitles.

103 minutes; PG-13; 2.35:1 (16×9-enhanced); English DD 5.1, English Dolby Surround, French Dolby Surround; CC; English, Spanish subtitles; DVD-9; Region One; Fox