Themes: Intersecting Lives, Women's Friendship, Mothers and Daughters
Main Cast: Kathy Baker, Amy Brenneman, Elpidia Carrillo, Glenn Close, Stephen Dillane
Release Year: 2004
Country: US
Run Time: 114 minutes
Plot
Filmmaker Rodrigo García takes an unusual look into the lives of nine different women in this episodic drama. Each of the film's nine sequences has been staged as a single shot, using the Steadicam system to allow the camera to follow the action fluidly and without cuts. In these short episodes (lasting between ten and 14 minutes), Holly (Lisa Gay Hamilton) has a brief moment of reverie while confronting the specters of her past in her old neighborhood. Maggie (Glenn Close) escorts her young daughter Maria (Dakota Fanning) to a cemetery as they visit the graves of their family members. Ruth (Sissy Spacek) is a married woman contemplating an affair while visiting Henry (Aidan Quinn) in his hotel room. Diana (Robin Wright Penn) unexpectedly runs into an old boyfriend, Damian (Jason Isaacs), while shopping for groceries. Camilla (Kathy Baker) is a hospital patient awaiting surgery for cancer. Samantha (Amanda Seyfried) is a teenage girl who helps look after her handicapped father Larry (Ian McShane). Sandra (Elpidia Carrillo) is a female prison inmate who is expecting a visit from her children. Sonia (Holly Hunter) lashes out at her boyfriend Martin (Stephen Dillane) when she finds out he's been cheating on her. And Lorna (Amy Brenneman) has an unexpectedly moving encounter with her ex-husband Andrew (William Fichtner) as she pays her respects to his second wife, who has just passed away. Nine Lives premiered at the 2005 Sundance Film Festival. ~ Mark Deming, All Movie Guide
Review
When a director has ambitious technical goals, as Rodrigo García has in Nine Lives, his narrative goals should logically suffer -- at least a little bit. Yet the Colombian writer/director avoids such pitfalls in this impressive collection of short films, each 10 to 15 minutes in length, featuring an array of female characters living in modern-day Los Angeles. Some of their lives intersect, some don't, but each snapshot reveals enough to give that story independent resonance, without the compulsive and gimmicky need to relate everyone to everyone else. Skeptics might argue that García's technique is already gimmick enough. Namely, each short unfurls in real time, captured in a single continuous take using a Steadicam. Not only is this a feat of precise choreography, it also places intense pressure on the actors, whose any stuttered line or missed cue could force them to scrap the whole shot, even moments from completion. For cinematography geeks, it's enthralling to watch Xavier Pérez Grobet's camera snake through a women's prison and navigate the aisles of a grocery store, all while his director (himself a former DP) conducts the actors to their marks at the exact right moment. Almost showing off, García even points the camera into several mirrors, without the recording device once appearing in the reflected image. But Nine Lives is no mere stylistic exercise. García remains fascinated by the social experiences of women, returning to some of the same topics from his film Things You Can Tell Just by Looking at Her, and using a handful of the actresses (Holly Hunter, Glenn Close, Amy Brenneman, Kathy Baker) from that project as well. His technique illuminates themes from both films. "Just by looking" at these women, during key 10-minute snippets from their lives, a viewer can see the minute suffering that's central to their identities. ~ Derek Armstrong, All Movie Guide
Nine Lives is a 2005Americandrama film written and directed by Rodrigo García. The screenplay, an example of hyperlink cinema, relates nine short, loosely intertwined tales with nine different women at their cores. Their themes include parent-child relationships, fractured love, adultery, illness, and death. Similar to García's previous work, Things You Can Tell Just by Looking at Her, it is a series of overlapping vignettes, each one running about the same length and told in a single, unbroken take, featuring an ensemble cast.
Imprisoned Sandra (Elpidia Carrillo) has an emotional breakdown when the broken telephone in her cubicle prevents her from communicating with her daughter on visiting day.
Diana (Robin Wright Penn) and Damian, two former flames now married to others, unexpectedly have a poignant reunion in the aisle of the local supermarket.
Teenaged Samantha (Amanda Seyfried) is torn between her non-communicative parents Ruth and Larry (Ian McShane), each of whom questions her about everything the other one has to say.
Divorcée Lorna (Amy Brenneman) must cope with her ex-husband Andrew's (William Fichtner) sexual desire for her during his second wife's funeral.
Ruth (Sissy Spacek), primary caretaker for her wheelchair-using husband, becomes increasingly guilt-ridden during a tryst with drunken widower Henry (Aidan Quinn) in a hotel.
Camille (Kathy Baker) is facing breast cancer surgery and uses her waiting time to lash out at her quietly supportive husband Richard (Joe Mantegna).
Maggie (Glenn Close) discusses life with her daughter Maria (Dakota Fanning) during a picnic in the cemetery and realizes how much she needs the little girl's loving comfort.
Production
The film premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in January 2005 and was shown at the Los Angeles Film Festival and the Locarno Film Festival, where it won the Golden Leopard for Best Film and the entire cast was awarded the Bronze Leopard for Best Actress, before going into limited release in the US in October. It opened on seven screens and earned $28,387 in its opening weekend. It eventually grossed $478,830 in the US and $1,084,093 in foreign markets for a total worldwide box office of $1,562,923 [1].
Stephen Holden of the New York Times described it as "a film that may be the closest movies have come to the cinematic equivalent of a collection of Chekhov short stories. The film's reward for intense concentration is a feeling of deep empathy and connection. For once, you don't harbor the uneasy suspicion of having been emotionally manipulated ... Mr. García has made a film that could be described as radically realistic ... In its subtle, understated performances, the actors vanish into characters who behave like ordinary people observed through one-way glass." [2]
Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times said, "Rodrigo Garcia ... the son of the novelist Gabriel Garcia Marquez ... has the same love for his characters, and although his stories are all (except for one) realistic, he shares his father's appreciation for the ways lives interweave and we touch each other even if we are strangers. A movie like this, with the appearance of new characters and situations, focuses us; we watch more intently, because it is important what happens." [3]
Ruthe Stein of the San Francisco Chronicle called the film "an emotionally satisfying example of a genre whose sketchiness can be off-putting" and added, "García knows how to create juicy roles for actresses, and they return the favor with performances of such concentrated intensity that you cannot take your eyes off them." [4]
Michael Wilmington of the Chicago Tribune awarded the film four out of five stars, describing it as "one of the most interesting and original American films out right now" and "a disturbingly frank look at people and relationships in contemporary Los Angeles and a thrilling dramatic showcase for a brilliant cast." He added, "[The] stories might seem the stuff of soap opera, but Garcia and his superb cast turn most of them into dramatic gold. The peculiar overall structure makes them distinctive as well, the way these little semi-Chekhovian, semi-Andre Dubus pieces play out against each other." [5]
Kevin Thomas of the Los Angeles Times called it "that rare episode film that actually accrues a cumulative power and doesn't merely proceed from one segment to the next. By the time it's over it has become a testament to the inner resilience of women in coping with a critical moment in their lives ... Each segment seems perfectly shaped and timed, not lasting a second too long yet always of sufficient length to be satisfying in itself. García's large ensemble cast is impeccable, and he and his actors have created a film as memorable as it is subtle ... Nine Lives is a sophisticated, elegant-looking film shot in distinctive, wide-ranging L.A. locales, but its real terrain is the human heart, explored with compassion and respect." [6]
