Garcia gives us single moments from the lives of nine different women, each presented in a single uninterrupted shot of roughly ten minutes. And what a cast he's assembled! Those nine women are played by Kathy Baker, Amy Brenneman, Elpidia Carrillo, Glenn Close, Lisa Gay Hamilton, Holly Hunter, Robin Wright Penn, Amanda Seyfried, and Sissy Spacek; also on hand are Mary Kay Place, Dakota Fanning, Joe Mantegna, Jason Isaacs, Aidan Quinn, William Fichtner, and Ian McShane.
As you might expect from so remarkable a collection of talent, the performances here are uniformly excellent. I was particularly impressed, though, by Baker's viciously honest work as a woman facing surgery with great fear and anger, and Hamilton's preparation for a painful reunion with her father, who has treated her very badly.
Garcia is drawn to women's stories; his first film, Things You Can Tell Just By Looking at Her, had a similar structure, with slightly more connection between the stories (and an equally impressive cast, including some of the same actresses); Ten Tiny Love Stories is a collection of monologues for women (it doesn't appear to have ever been theatrically released in the US, but the DVD is now at the top of my Netflix queue).
The scenes in Nine Lives don't generally end with tidy resolution; on the contrary, they usually end precisely as each woman finds herself at an emotional crossroads, finally facing people and situations they can no longer avoid. There are common themes -- motherhood (Spacek and Seyfried play mother and daughter, the only two of the nine women with any significant connection), absent loved ones, lives that have fallen into ruts -- but there is no overarching plot. These are nine short stories, snapshots of single moments -- particularly dramatic moments, to be sure -- from ordinary lives.
Recommended very enthusiastically.
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