Nine Lives
Studio: Magnolia Films
Rated: R
Website: http://www.9livesmovie.com/
Release Date: 2005-12-02
Cast: Kathy Baker, Amy Brenneman, Andrew Borba, Elpidia Carrillo, Glenn Close
Director: Rodrigo Garcia
Screenwriter: Rodrigo Garcia
Music Score: Edward Shearmur
WorkNameSort: Nine Lives
Our Rating: 2.00

You couldn’t cram another gimmick into Nine Lives if you doubled its running time and made the screen twice as high. For starters, the movie is an anthology of nine dramatic stories, each of which was shot in real time – a single camera recording the action in a long, unbroken take. There’s a certain amount of cross-pollination, with major characters from some vignettes showing up as supporting presences in others. Finally, every one of the nine segments in some way concerns the sad, complicated lot of modern women. (And if you don’t think that focusing on the female is considered a gimmick even in the upper echelons of indie-land, you’re far overestimating the ideological purity of the business.)

Of the many stunts the film tries to float, the no-edits stricture (surprisingly) comes closest to succeeding. It isn’t until the fourth segment – a portrait of a teenage girl (Amanda Seyfried) at a personal crossroads – that the approach becomes confining, the camera ping-ponging monotonously from a family kitchen to a bedroom and back again. Until then, director Rodrigo Garc’a makes his one-take, one-perspective limitation work for him, using it to convey the claustrophobia of a women’s prison or the pent-up frustration of two former lovers (Robin Wright Penn, Jason Isaacs) who search for closure in a supermarket’s produce aisle.

The whole thing could be a diverting footnote to past continuous-take triumphs Rope and Russian Ark, but what separates Nine Lives from those esteemed forebears is its dearth of substantial story content. Every one of the filmed playlets feels like an improv exercise undertaken by a handful of eager acting students, in response to a randomly proffered scenario: “You’re a married woman on a motel date with a man who’s not your husband!” “You’re about to have a mastectomy!” Were it not for Garc’a’s writing credit and cinematographer Xavier Pérez Grobet’s constant anticipation of the characters’ most sudden-seeming moves, it would be easy to believe that the dialogue and plot points were being made up on the spot. The interaction between Penn and Isaacs, for instance, is practically unfathomable, veering from fervent declarations of undying devotion to bitter brush-offs, as if neither actor is paying honest attention to anything the other is saying.

With an average duration of 13 measly minutes, each segment still has plenty of dead air, requiring the ensemble cast (including Holly Hunter and Sissy Spacek) to pull some serious diva fits to fill the gaps between scripted gobbledygook. (“Each woman is a universe,” clangs one of the tinnier pronouncements that García – son of the writer Gabriel García Márquez – hands his dramatis personae.)

If Nine Lives is a woman, though, she’s one who’s afraid to commit. There aren’t enough crossovers – of personalities or story elements – between the segments to effect a cohesive statement (like the ones executive producer Alejandro González Iñárritu made in his directorial outings Amores Perros and 21 Grams). And too many of the minidramas lead to no resolution in particular. Only the final tale, which accompanies a mother (Glenn Close) and daughter (Dakota Fanning) on a graveside visit, has the O. Henry ending the format all but requires. This is a movie predicated on contrivance after contrivance, but it doesn’t even have the diligence to be genuinely calculated.

This article appears in Nov 30 – Dec 6, 2005.