Setting aside his personal problems, Hugh Grant's talent for wacky romantic comedy is in full bloom in "Nine Months" as he plays a hapless noncommittal male who has no desire to marry his girlfriend of five years (Julianne Moore), much less become a father. So, when she tells him she is pregnant, he blows a fuse. Not that he blows up, mind you — he just short-circuits.
That's the essential center of "Nine Months," which focuses on Grant's character as he burns up, burns out and allows his relationship to fizzle in the third month of Moore's pregnancy.
He does realize his mistake, of course, and then desperately wants to win her back. But instead, he learns in-line skating and gets an earring.
Unfortunately, "desperate" is the operative word here, as the film sputters and stumbles more than Grant's character.
The story is pretty weak to begin with, so writer-director Chris Columbus, who based "Nine Months" on a French movie that has never been released in this country, fills it out with wacky characters:
— Jeff Goldblum plays an eccentric, neurotic and pompous failed artist — and the unlikely best friend of Grant's character, a high-rolling child psychologist in San Francisco, who seems to be afraid of children.
— Tom Arnold appears in his usual bombastic, obnoxious buddy role, as a car salesman who inadvertently stumbles into Grant's life. In this case, however, Arnold exhibits none of the goofy charm that was evident in "True Lies." (Chalk that up to James Cameron being a stronger director.)
— Joan Cusack is Arnold's wife and mother of their bratty children, doing a variation on her patented sweetly dippy best-friend role, this time adding motherhood to the mix.
— And finally, Robin Williams shows up for two extended comic sequences as a Russian obstetrician whose fracturing of the English language allows him to say crude, vulgar words that are apparently supposed to be funny because they are spoken with a Russian accent. (Is this what happened to Williams' character from "Moscow On the Hudson"?)
Writer-director Chris Columbus, who is a star filmmaker now after the huge success of the two "Home Alone" movies and "Mrs. Doubtfire," has come up with some amusing comic bits, but they generally prove to be funny only while building momentum. By the time a gag reaches its payoff, it seems to have run out of steam. (Check out the "Barney" spoof and the running gag about a praying mantis.)
This is especially true of a lengthy, climactic race to the hospital after Moore goes into labor. Grant's wild driving is responsible for a number of people finding they need medical attention, which leads to his taking a carload of people to the hospital. This is fairly well played — until they reach the hospital and the action shifts to the delivery room. Suddenly everything becomes more frantic than funny. (And why does Columbus think that Williams offering half-a-dozen variations on the word "epidural" is so hysterical?)
Columbus is probably mainstream Hollywood's most undisciplined director. He no doubt fancies himself a '90s version of Frank Capra or Howard Hawks when it comes to wild-eyed, screwball farce, but he needs someone to tell him when he's gone too far. Unlike Capra or Hawks, whose over-the-top shenanigans were tempered by an equal number of subtle touches, Columbus is just constantly over the top. Instead of recognizing that a little goes a long way, he just keeps piling on more and more, like the host who doesn't want any food left over when the party's over.
In between Columbus' excesses (which include thick sentiment as much as labored slapstick), the cast tries hard. Grant, Moore and Cusack fare best, creating real characters we care about. But Arnold, Goldblum and especially Williams seem content to do shtick, which never really amounts to more than vaudeville-level routines. Granted, Williams' ad-libbing is funnier than anything Columbus might write, but in this context even he becomes intrusive.
"Nine Months" is uneven, to say the least, but it does have some laughs. Audiences who don't care that they are getting a series of skits that barely hang together rather than a movie will probably have a good time.
The film is rated PG-13 for sex, profanity, vulgarity, violence and some nude paintings and statues.