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-
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-