Review of Nine Lives

by Roger Baldwin

Writer-director Rodrigo Garcia, son of Columbian Nobel laureate Gabriel Garcia Marquez, in Nine Lives conjures a bit of his father's mysticism amidst the sparse, unembellished realism of nine separate but interconnected theater pieces involving mostly women, and child; some 15 uninterrupted moments—a brief and incomplete episode—of each life. The strength of the movie lies in its technique, a compression of the novel of one's existence and its meanings and dimensions into a few contained paragraphs—in each vignette a situation is defined, conflicts erupt, personal histories are suggested but not clarified, we're given enough information to understand what we are watching, but only enough to encourage us to puzzle over it and extrapolate from life's complicated, dark pageantry as distilled into freeze-frames. Visually the scenes are underlined by single, sweeping, unedited shots which position the audience into singular points in time. It's an innovative and fascinating method. The film's primary weakness is the varying quality of the stories themselves. The first three are quickening in their direct, emotional intensity: an imprisoned Hispanic woman (Elpidio Carillo) desperate to maintain contact with her young daughter; a settled, pregnant, middle-class white woman (Robin Wright Penn) turbulently unsettled by happening upon an ex-lover, the love of her life; a black, prodigal step-daughter (Lisa Gay Hamilton) returned home to make terms with a troubled childhood. These led me to expect an ascending arc of gratifying movie-goingdom. Some of the rest are interesting, and link a few loose threads, but are also relatively slack and disappointing. Until the final event with Maggie (Glenn Close) and her daughter Maria (Dakota Fanning) at a cemetery, in an understated and heart-fracturing turn I've seen before, but I don't think the New York Times review I read actually understood.

Read about Nine Lives in the Internet Movie Database

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