I feel like inside many writers there's an instinct to try and write a script where the protagonist is largely passive.
Let me put that another way--I've both read and written my fair share of scripts where this is the case. Sometimes (many times) it's a matter of us not really understanding our protagonists or wanting to protect them when we should be forcing them out of the nest and throwing rocks at them on the way down.
But every once in a while we consciously choose to write a script that way. I think it's because we have this sense that it's more realistic. Sometimes you don't know what to do in life, and you flail.
The problem (actually the blessing) is, movies and TV shows are not real life. It's maybe our greatest magic trick as writers--we want to hold a mirror up to life in one way or another, without being as dull and flat as normal life often is. We want our audiences to think they are looking at real life, while actually not being real.
NINE, the Anthony Minghella/Michael Tolkin-penned film adaptation of the Maury Weston/Arthur Kopit Broadway musical based on the Fellini movie 8 1/2, means to dramatize protagonist/Fellini stand-in Guido Contini's mid-life crisis. Which sounds like it could be pretty yummy terrain for a movie. Crisis=conflict=drama!
But for the most part the movie is the same scene played over and over--Guido trying to hide from the world and the crisis he's in and looking to different women to help him escape.
To the writers' credit, they do try to make his situation more interesting by offering complication after complication. Having chosen to hide out with his mistress at a spa, first his producer shows up--and brings with him the entire staff; then his wife, who then discovers his mistress is there, which forces him both to chase his wife to try and talk his way out of what's happened, and also deal with his mistress, who is so upset at the way he reacted to his wife seeing her that she takes some pills.
But in dealing with her he loses whatever progress he might have made with his wife, and also his producer, who then drags him to the set where he has to meet his star, who when she discovers there is no script and that he means to once again reduce her onscreen to his visual muse is just not having it. Finally the film has to be shut down.
They're all great big complications. The problem is, they never bring Guido to make any choices of his own. He just keeps angsting/running away until he's lost everything.
There's a final sequence some months later where he does make a choice, to make a new movie and try to win his wife back. Again, it sort of captures what happens in real life--how often is it the case that we don't move and change until after everything falls apart? But in a film or TV show that's the inciting incident. You just can't expect the audience to wait two hours for your character to do something.
There are a couple moments in the film that are interesting. Every time Judi Dench shows up the film suddenly comes to life. It's the same with Nicole Kidman's actress and to some extent with Kate Hudson's reporter.
I think what makes them different is that each of them has a life outside Guido and his drama. They speak and act with real agency of their own. In a film where the protagonist won't do anything, characters who do just leap off the screen.
Also the performances are tremendous. Just to present one: this is Kidman's whole sequence.
Even as she's singing that she loves him, she's so not wrapped up in him and his nonsense. She makes her own choices.
I've never seen the stage version of NINE. From what I gather director Rob Marshall cut most of its songs and asked for new material from composer Maury Yeston, despite it having won 5 Tonys, including Best Musical, Best Score and Best Direction. I'm going to guess it holds together quite a bit better.
When it comes to storytelling, it's all about choices. A character's choices tell us who they are and what they want. They create the circumstances from which complications and the next choices can occur. And they get us invested in the character. People talk about opening with a save the cat moment, and I think that's often a good idea. But really the point is not doing a good deed but making a big character-defining choice. That's what gets us hooked.
If a character is mostly passive, we may learn things about who they are and what they want. But it's very hard to be interested in them.
