Nine Lives

I just saw the movie and right now it feels like one of my top all time favorites. As in up there with Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie and 400 Blows and La Dolce Vita. I don't know why ten fragments of stories should have that power. Maybe because the writing is genius? No pandering to conventional standards of entertainment, just a great author mining vein after vein of truth and freeing his brilliant actors to be intensely fearlessly human at every second. This is the movie that Crash wishes it was (and I thought Crash was awesome). No preaching. No "ideas." Just the human heart on display. Amazing that a woman lying in a hospital bed facing a mastectomy got the biggest laughs--because Kathy Baker, speaking Rodrigo Garcia's lines, so completely captured the frustration and helplessness that all of us have felt that all the audience could do was laugh in recognition. Go see this one.

Those who like their movies big on Hollywood, hilarity, frenetic pacing and neato special effects, are bound to brand Nine Lives with the misogynist "CF" (for chick flick). Do not to listen to them. Rodrigo Garcia (scion of the writer Gabriel Garcia Marquez) is a writer-director who is not afraid to make films that showcase his intellect and humanity -- however noncommercial those qualities may be. He is that rare Hollywood species: a male director who really digs and respects women without the taint of awe or condescension. In fact his films are not really about women, they are more universally about relationships. As the director himself explained after a recent showing of Nine Lives at the Virginia Film Festival, where he was accompanied by the very cool Sissy Spacek and Kathy Baker, as well as the two (female) producers (graduates of UVA's law and business schools); "the film is about relationships that have ended but will never be over." Go see Nine Lives, if only for the single takes -- an exceedingly difficult cinematic feat that beats any special effect.

Rodrigo Garcia's "Nine Lives" raises the question of just how emotionally invested a viewer can become in a character who appears on screen for no more than ten or a dozen minutes throughout the course of a movie. And what happens if ALL the main characters show up for that little a time? For this is the case with "Nine Lives," a compilation of vignettes about nine virtually unconnected ladies, each of whom is struggling with issues common to women in a modern world. Some are coping with messy relationships, others with regrets about past actions, still others with health issues and the looming possibility of death. Even though the stories abut slightly on one another from time to time, each exists essentially as a stand-alone sketch able to function without the others.

The main problem with a movie like "Nine Lives" is that, for all the insights it offers into life and human relationships (and they are many), it simply can't develop its characters to any appreciable extent in the time it has allotted them. Just as we are becoming engaged by a particular woman and her situation, the movie shuts us down by cutting away to the next segment. This is really no criticism of the movie per se - which is a well written, well acted and well directed piece of lyrical film-making - but the structure dilutes our interest and robs the film of the cumulative force it might have had were the individual stories fleshed out to feature length.

Still, given the limitations, this is a film filled with flavorful moments and fine performances from a large and gifted cast that includes Sissy Spacek, Mary Kay Place, Glenn Close, Dakota Fanning, Holly Hunter, Lisa Gay Hamilton, Robin Wright Penn, Joe Mantegna and Aiden Quinn, among many others. And the final moments are so tender, poignant and touching that they carry the film to a level where it transcends artifice and makes a genuine human connection with its audience. Thus, despite the reservations one might have about the film as a whole, the parts are more than compelling enough to make it well worth watching.

I too saw this film at the Sundance Film Festival and was very, very happy with it. It's simply vignettes of nine women's lives (with intercepting characters and mutual acquaintances), the people in their lives and more importantly the relationships in their lives. They're sad and sometimes not so sad, examples of the walls we build around ourselves in our relationships and how we feel bound to people or stuck in situations that we can't escape. It's very well made, with each women's vignette composed of one long 10-12 minute scene (no cuts). The dialogue is completely natural as are the actor's portrayal's of their characters, and the characters seem so real-life, so believably everyday. I couldn't say which story I enjoyed the most, but Robin Wright Penn and Jason Isaac's scene and relationship was especially poignant for me and I thought, amazingly acted. Overall this movie is great and I would recommend it to anyone who is a student of human nature or just in need of a moving film.

Columbian director and writer Rodrigo García (Things you can tell just by looking at her, multiple episodes of Six Feet Under, Carnivale, The Sopranos, Fathers and Sons, etc) does what few writer/directors are capable of: García observes the human condition, finds the stories that such observations suggests, fleshes out these ideas into vignettes, and then weaves them into a tapestry of a film that is simply breathtaking.

NINE LIVES is simply the reporting of nine women and their surrounding characters who are coping with an emotional crisis involving relationships with a parent, child, lover, husband, or sister and the manner in which each woman deals with keeping her life intact despite the trials of everyday living. Imagine walking down a street, as a flaneur, observing glimpses of a person and conversation that lasts only as long as the time you approach, pause and pass on by and you have an idea of the technique García uses. These little short stories are the stuff of life we all encounter: García pauses long enough to let them make an impact.

Part of the beauty of this film is the sterling cast which includes some of our finest actors - Kathy Baker, Amy Brenneman, K Callan, Glenn Close, Stephen Dillane, Dakota Fanning, Holly Hunter, Jason Isaacs, Joe Mantegna, Ian McShane, Mary Kay Place, Aidan Quinn, Sissy Spacek, Robin Wright Penn - the list goes on. There is a sense of ensemble commitment to this film despite that only occasionally do the characters overlap. The writing is terse, understated, always saying just enough to arrest our attention before moving on, much the way life keeps passing. A very fine work, and one that reminds us that great movies from quiet stories come. Grady Harp