Nine Months
First screened in May 1999 / Most recently screened in August 2024
Director: Chris Columbus. Cast: Hugh Grant, Julianne Moore, Tom Arnold, Joan Cusack, Jeff Goldblum, Robin Williams, Mia Cottet, Priscilla Alden, Kristin Davis. Screenplay: Chris Columbus (adapted from the movie Neuf mois, written by Patrick Braoudé and Daniel Russo and directed by Patrick Braoudé). VOR:①
Except as a case study in the vertigo low-lying actors can experience upon being thrust into a limelight, it's hard to see much value here.
Who likes their situation less: a) Samuel in Nine Months, who blasts way past recognizable pre-fatherhood anxieties and relationship ambivalence and achieves instead a kind of Tourette's-flavored apotheosis/nadir of mentally, physically, and emotionally discombobulated male narcissism; or b) Hugh Grant, who in his first Hollywood vehicle has to play Samuel and seems indivisibly panicked and perturbed about it? The answer might be c) the audience.
Nobody in the supremely improbable Hugh Grant – Julianne Moore – Tom Arnold triangle at the center of Nine Months has ever pretended to have hit it off with the others. Nor, to his credit, has Grant denied feeling utterly out of his habitat on this production and self-defeatingly committed to playing most of his post-Four Weddings characters as if they were all the same man. After more than 20 years, I got around to wondering if the unpleasant mood on set was palpable in the movie and if Grant was rather too hard on himself. And the answers are a) not really, though Moore masks it best, and b) no, he's sadly quite right, and rarely more so than about Nine Months. But the weirdest thing is the movie itself, which is a plaid-on-paisley-on-polka-dot clash of comic tones, none played well, and such a psychopathic hyperbole of male immaturity and indecision that it really ought to end as Streetcar Named Desire does, with Samuel walked off in a straitjacket.
The hostility of what could have been an amiably mediocre comedy (and it's lit and scored as if it is one) is way off the charts. Samuel isn't just out of sync with his wife, he has multiple visions of her as an ever-growing mantis who wants to eat him. We haven't let Hugh Grant ever forget the name Divine Brown ever since his ...misstep on the literal eve of this film's release, but when it comes to inexplicable behavior, surely the bigger mystery is doing everything in your power to avoid matrimony with Julianne Moore? The sort-of-strangers, sort-of-acquaintances played by Arnold and Joan Cusack are not just comic foils but beyond-boorish nemeses with actual demon children, one of whom materializes between Moore's and Grant's bodies during beneath-the-sheets foreplay. As for the Robin Williams sequences, which at least hit a couple of their marks, somebody on this team had an ob/gyn experience that wasn't just bad but epochally bad.
Nine Months is an awkward and often unfunny and perhaps unconsciously angry comedy. A misfired farce from the director of Home Alone is not a shock. A remake of True Lies in the guise of an extended pregnancy-is-frightening sketch is more of a surprise, but there it all is: a role for Tom Arnold, a wife enjoined to comically/erotically dance for her husband, and a script adapted from a French film, the way wilted arugula is adapted from fresh, a climactic paean to mother-father-child triad. If you're asking, "Yeah, but True Lies is about a nuclear bomb that might kill millions of people and Nine Months is just about a baby en route," you're starting to get a sense of the gargantuan fear and trembling that Nine Months can barely suppress about parenthood, couplehood, and mantishood. The movie eats itself. Grade:D
