Nine Lives (2005)

Very disappointing...

It is a whirlwind of delight --- attractive actors, stunning couture, spectacular sets and outrageous parties.

The best films of this genre always show a path and provide a takeaway for being a better person.

The movie really just wants to entertain people.

"Nine Lives" is composed of a series of nine short stories that focus on the female condition. With an average of 11 or 12 minutes per segment shot in one continuous take, there is no time for resolution (except perhaps for the last story that occurs in a cemetery). Rather, the narratives demonstrate emotional conflicts in the lives of women who are unable to escape their circumstances. As each story stands on its own, an advantage is that the movie is easy to watch. There is neither a plot to ascertain nor any character progression; it is not difficult to understand the situations. But we do not always know where these women are going.The first vignette ("Sandra") features an incarcerated Hispanic-American woman (Elpidia Carrillo) who spends much of her screen time washing a prison floor. It is obvious that her emotional state – really her temper – has gotten her into trouble with the law. The second segment ("Diana") concerns a pregnant woman (Robin Wright Penn) who meets an old flame in a supermarket. The third part ("Holly") presents a distraught African-American woman (LisaGay Hamilton), acting most erratically, who has obviously been traumatized. Apparently she was sexually abused; she may have an unwelcome present for her father. The fourth episode ("Sonia") involves a woman (Holly Hunter) and her lover who blab confidential information to their two friends. The fifth vignette concerns "Samantha," a mature and sweet teenager (Amanda Seyfried) who acts as a peacemaker between her bickering parents. But her wings are indeed clipped.Next is "Lorna," a piece that involves a mute man who wants to have sexual intercourse with his ex-wife at the wake of his second spouse. She (Amy Brenneman) does not protest too much. Number seven ("Ruth") involves a married middle-aged woman contemplating a tryst with a man at a hotel. The penultimate episode is about "Camille," an angry woman (Kathy Baker) who upbraids her loving husband while she awaits her mastectomy at a hospital. Believe me, her sedative comes none too soon. The husband (Joe Mantegna) has the patience of a saint. The final part, the best one, concerns a bereaved and aging woman "Maggie" (Glenn Close) and daughter Maria (Dakota Fanning) who have a picnic at a cemetery. The little girl's lunch consists of exactly one bite of a sandwich and a single grape. And Maggie's use of an obscenity in front of a child and Maria's non-reaction is a dead giveaway (no pun intended). The story's conclusion is obvious but this writer will not reveal it here. By the way, Dakota Fanning, who was 11 years old in 2005, looks no older than eight or nine. This observation implies this last vignette had to have been filmed a few years earlier. Some folks, like Sissy Spacek, appear in two episodes that may be connected (parts five and seven). Spacek is a fine actress. Sidney Poitier's daughter Sydney (Vanessa in "Holly"), who looks just like him, is very attractive. Amanda Seyfried is certainly one of the planet's beautiful people; she began her silver screen career in "Mean Girls." The artistic performances are fine in "Nine Lives," and so much emotion is demonstrated. A way of brief description is "so much feeling in such a tight space." But as the vignette endings are ambiguous, traditionalists who like long features with resolutions may not appreciate this one.

Some of the effectiveness of this film comes from the camera taking a single shot for the entire segment. The camera follows the main character, occasionally panning to persons or sets to give context. It left me curious as to how many takes were required to get the vignette just right. The actors had to know their lines to get from beginning to end, something of a rarity these days except on-stage.Every segment was believable, if occasionally over-wrought; that is, the viewer could agree with the writer/director that someone would act a particular way, but it was not always the most obvious way to act. As with many films, the plot line was often more about persons acting from their impulse rather than acting from their reason. Most of life is not that way, Sarah Palin excepted, but it IS that way for some, and I suppose that makes their lives more interesting than the lives of the folks that live logically. Film makers choose, fortunately, the interesting and sometimes thought-provoking story line over the banal.

"Nine Lives" features outstanding performances and remarkable direction, but as with many films with multiple story lines, you're likely to become frustrated trying to piece the vignettes together.Similar in structure to Robert Altman's "Short Cuts" and the films of Alejandro González Iñárritu, who served as executive producer, "Nine Lives" features nine vignettes of women in emotional crises. Each scene is shot in a single take with a Steadicam, which is a remarkable achievement considering the elaborate choreography many of these scenes require.The performances are uniformly excellent, but special credit must be give to Robin Wright Penn as an expectant mother who runs into her old boyfriend in a supermarket and Lisa Gay Hamilton as a troubled young woman who has a score to settle with her father. Several of the characters make cameos in other scenes, but the film offers no great "voila" moments where all the relationships fall into place.While the whole of "Nine Lives" is less than the sum of its parts, this is a worthwhile film for its remarkable cast and well-directed scenes.

In a question and answer session with director Rodrigo Garcia and a handful of the film's cast members (available as a special feature on the DVD release), Garcia says that the motivation behind "Nine Lives" was the idea of looking into people's windows and capturing a moment of their lives in real time, without formal beginning or end. If that is the case, tell me what street these people's houses sit on, and remind me never to live there.This relentlessly sombre film gives us nine vignettes, each focusing on a moment in the life of a woman. Characters from one segment will appear in another, a gimmick that ties into the film's theme of connectedness but that otherwise has become one big mighty cliché in this day of Tarantinos, PT Andersons and Innaritus (who serves as producer on this film, by the way). The biggest flaw is that this gimmick remains just that -- it forces a structured narrative on a film that doesn't need one, but it doesn't bring any additional nuance to the film. For instance, in a segment featuring Lisa Gay Hamilton as a deeply disturbed woman who comes home to settle scores with her father, we find that the character of the father has already appeared in the film's first segment, as a prison warden, but the connection doesn't tell us anything about him, his daughter or their relationship. Hamilton appears as a nurse in a later segment in which a woman (Kathy Baker) is being prepped for a mastectomy, but again, there's no continuity of character -- we don't know how to relate this calm and sedate nurse to the frantic young woman we saw earlier, and Garcia offers no help -- Hamilton could be playing completely different characters.Worst of all, Garcia's vision of life is unnecessarily gloomy and sad. Each woman deals with her own private demon, whether it be lost love, fear of death, loss of a loved one, murderous rage, guilt, regret, bitterness. But the movie is seriously lacking any message of hope. According to Garcia, life is a struggle, but he never illuminates what makes the struggle worthwhile.In any movie like this, the selling point is the acting, and it's no surprise that the performances are what make this film most worth watching. Robin Wright Penn, Kathy Baker and Glenn Close, in particular, do smashing work, and Close's segment, which closes the film, may just take your breath away.Nice try, but not an unequivocal success.Grade: B-