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.

Director Rodrigo Garcia is the son of the famous writer Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Brought up in a literary environment and choosing another medium of communication--the cinema--for himself, the son uses the tool of the father to chisel away at sculpting good cinema. Spoken words, characters, relationships play a major role in the finished product that a reader of Marquez would find easier to appreciate than others.

Ostensibly, the film is collection of 9 short stories or vignettes of 9 different women. In the first four, some characters appear in other episodes. The last five are connected by the word "connection". The last of the nine remains the most difficult and intriguing and an appropriate one to end the film.

The film captures each of the nine segments in a single shot without a cut. The film resembles various works of Robert Altman--even the long-shot of "The Player"--and the structure of "Magnolia" and "Crash." What "Nine Lives" has that the others do not is the Marquezian element of magical realism.

To explain this one has to begin at the final episode. "Nine lives" alludes to the cat. A cat is shown on a gravestone. A mother (old enough to be a grandmother) escorts a young girl (her daughter) to a grave and brings with her not flowers, but a bunch of grapes. She leaves the grapes behind on the grave. The final shot does not show the girl but the mother alone. Whose grave is it? Is the young girl real (or alive)? Did the mother bring grapes for a child who loved grapes, who is now merely a memory for an old woman? The stories are interconnected by relationships (mother-child) episode 1 and 9, parents and children (2 episodes of Holly and Samantha), husband and wife (Camille) and the trio of husband, wife and lover (Diana, Lorna and Ruth).

To savor the richness of the film, one has to go beyond each segment and look at the links the director provides to see the breaks in relationships and the ultimate reconciliation the full film provides. In the first episode, the viewer sees a break in the relationships. In the finale there is reconciliation even in death. In between, divorced couples consent to sex, a young teenager appears to be more sensible than her quarreling parents by giving up a chance for better education to keep the fragile family together, and another fighting couple remind you of Albee's George and Martha in "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?" An abused daughter realizes she cannot kill her father. A faithful husband helps his wife get emotionally ready for a mastectomy.

If there is a flaw, you can point out that it looks at nine women rather than nine men. But then in literature, cats are associated with females rather than men, and the director was born to a family who appreciated literature.

There is little that is spoken in this film. But each word is important to understand and enjoy the film. It is a film that deserved the Locarno Film festival honors. Personally, I loved the performances of Glen Close, Robin Wright Penn, the lovely Amanda Seyfried, Elpida Carillo and Ian McShane. But the entire cast was great--like any Altman film. Garcia, unlike Altman, stresses on the spoken word, not merely the images and music.

I saw the film at the recently concluded Dubai Film Festival. Was it a coincidence that Marquez's friend and Chilean filmmaker of repute--Miguel Littin--was outside the cinema hall trying to get a feel of the reaction of the audience to film made by his friend's son without being noticed?

I can't add a whole lot to what everyone else has said about this film. It's a series of vignettes that are loosely related. The acting is very good -- after all they got a whole bunch of Hollywood big guns to sign up. And I think the reason they signed up was because for an actor, this film is a bonanza. They get to play very intense emotions in a very tight space, without any dead dialog or perplexing plot (the plot isn't perplexing because there ain't no plot.) So it's a real treat to watch, but if you're looking for something really profound about life, forget it. About the only lesson here is that women are a force unto themselves, and a lot of the time the best you can do is just stand back. Each of the reviewers seems to have their favorite actors out of the nine, but I give them all a gold star for acting, and that includes the men too. BTW this is not a lighthearted romp -- it starts in a prison and ends in a graveyard. Mostly heavy stuff.

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

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.