Nine Lives (2005)

The Nine Lives is a memorable movie. The powerful images it presents will keep circulating in your mind for some time. However, if I try to dig deeper into the imagery, I find very little what I could call 'profound'. The lives and situations that the film presents are just too mundane.Garcia tells us 9 short stories of ordinary people and he tells it with style. The camera work is stunning and effective at the same time - I read about it before I saw the film - I was afraid it would be a gimmick, but I was really impressed. The acting is probably the most important part of the film. It's what carries the film and makes it so memorable. However the situations themselves, while emotionally charged through the top notch acting and the direction, are just banal. People not getting over old relationships for years, people disagreeing, people living their lives. Some may enjoy watch a sketch of ordinary lives of ordinary people. For me it was simply not interesting enough. I am already living an ordinary life and I don't need to go to the movies to watch people disagreeing and people crying over their ex-es.

I am so sad to have to rate this a 1 out of 10. It was a total 10 until the out-of-the-blue ending. The actors were fabulous. You just have to know going into it that nothing is really resolved or figured out by the viewer. You watch very engaging snippets of women's harried lives, yet the whole experience leaves the viewer wanting more. More of an explanation, more of a follow-through. It's like reading the middle of a wonderfully gripping book, but then having no beginning and no ending. Each chapter on each woman had so much depth and intrigue, but again, you never find out why things are like they are or where things are going when they could take on so many different pathways. There's so much potential to see where the women end up, or what decisions they make based on little morsels of potential truths. I felt I was led to believe there would be more, but then the movie was over. I was disappointed, all in all.

Need the sins of the father be visited upon the son? Not if the terrific- nay, great, little 2005 film, Nine Lives, written and directed by Rodrigo Garcia, is Exhibit A. Garcia is the son of famed Nobel Prize winning magical realist fictionist Gabriel Garcia Marquez, of Love In A Time Of Cholera and One Hundred Years Of Solitude fame. Yet, despite that fame, the father's work, in novels and short fictions, is usually baroque and anomic in narrative, and hollow and superficial in characterization. In this film, his son, however, shows how quickly and deftly a whole life can be sketched and distilled- if not contained, in just ten to twelve real time minutes, doing something his father never did- create complex and compelling characters and situations. He has a human touch in his art that his father has always lacked with his magical realism.This hour and fifty-two minute film is, in short, antithetical to everything Garcia's father's art stands for. And, as a film-goer, you should be very thankful for that! I'd never heard of this director, but heard good things about this film. However, I never take such recommendations too seriously, because for every great film like this I am told I need to see pretentious trash, like Crash, this past year's Oscar winner, an ensemble film that only wishes it could have a fraction of the hyper-realism this film does. Prior to this film, Garcia had directed commercials, some television episodes, including The Sopranos, and two prior low budget films- 2001's Ten Tiny Love Stories, and 2000's Things You Can Tell Just By Looking At Her.The film that this most reminded me of was Jill Sprecher's great 2001 film, 13 Conversations About One Thing, save that that film wove all its character's plights into a single loose thread, while this film is simply nine short films with a few crossover characters. Jim Jarmusch's recent compilation film of related short subjects, Coffee And Cigarettes, also mines this territory and style, but with nowhere near the success of Nine Lives. Of the nine segments, all named after the lead female character within, for Garcia seems to have a reputation as a woman's filmmaker, seven are brilliant or great, and the two weaker pieces are still good, solid films that experiment with the medium. However, any short story collection that was published, with seven of its nine tales being great would become a classic…. Other films, like Magnolia and Grand Canyon, try this overlapping technique, but they all tie things up at the end, often with all the characters meeting. These films are merely moments that will be big memories in the minds of each of the protagonists, in years to come. The backstories are implied so well, subtly and quickly, that it's not at all difficult to get into each scene within minutes of their starting. Yet, to know everything in those backstories would beg triteness and lengthen the film so that only two, perhaps three, of the stories, could still fit within.Garcia shows great command of his medium with his objective Chekhovian writing and zero endings, for what could have easily become a New Agey or Chick Flick piece of schlock. Unlike such films as Time Code, this experiment in filmic narrative works, and is a worthy descendant of the filmic experiments that Ingmar Bergman pioneered in the 1960s. It should have been one of the films nominated for an Oscar, along with other under-appreciated films like The New World, Match Point, and Shopgirl. But, Hollywood keeps on churning out schlock like Brokeback Mountain and Crash instead, while films like this are shunted aside. Fight back, watch this film, talk about it with others, and make sure that the powerbrokers know that there is a market for such films. It's the only way there will be more of them.

"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.