It’s more than just a technical stunt, but what an impressive technical stunt it is: “Nine Lives” is made up entirely of unbroken shots, each telling its own story, each lasting around 10 minutes.
| Interesting: A series of seemingly separate encounters, each lasting 10 minutes or so in an unbroken shot. The flawed characters are strongly acted by an all-star cast including Robin Wright Penn, Glenn Close, and Amy Brenneman.
Rated: R rating is for language, subject matter. Now showing: Varsity.on |
At first, we get the impression these stories are indeed unconnected. A prisoner (Elpidia Carrillo) bargains with a manipulative guard (Miguel Sandoval). Two old lovers (Robin Wright Penn and Jason Isaacs) meet accidentally in a supermarket, and within minutes are acknowledging the intense grip their past affair still has on them, social niceties forgotten. Two sisters quarrel violently about their father, who is very different to each of them.
Separate people, but then certain characters from early episodes begin to appear again, and we wonder whether all of this is meant to connect somehow.
At least, that seems to be the strategy of writer-director Rodrigo Garcia (the son of novelist Gabriel Garcia Marquez). Each vignette is compelling on its own, but the whole thing becomes more intriguing if we suspect there’s a connection.
Garcia doesn’t spell things out, so I think the connection remains vague and tantalizing rather than a jigsaw puzzle to be filled out. The movie doesn’t round itself out with a big finish, but settles for its individual pieces standing on their own.
If that’s not enough for a satisfying movie, at least the performances are uniformly potent. And because each shot goes on so long without a cut, Garcia relies on the actors to pace themselves and make the sequences dynamic.
There’s a little gem of a scene between Kathy Baker and Joe Mantegna as a wife awaiting mastectomy surgery and her understanding husband. Amy Brenneman has a tour de force as a woman who attends the funeral of her ex-husband’s wife, and shows very little grief.
Other performers include Ian McShane (from “Deadwood”), Sissy Spacek, Aidan Quinn, and Lisa Gay Hamilton. Some are small roles, some are hugely dramatic. One thing they share is non-heroic status: Everyone here, from cancer patients to grieving mothers, has defects, irritations, temptations. Whatever Garcia is saying about all these folks, he has a healthy attitude about how flawed we all are.
The final segment looks at a mother (Glenn Close) in conversation with her daughter (Dakota Fanning, uncanny as usual). It’s just the right haunting note to end this mysterious film.
Jason Isaacs and Robin Wright Penn in “Nine Lives.”
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