NINE LIVES
Directed & Written by: Rodrigo Garcia.
Produced by: Julie Lynn.
Director of Photography: Xavier Pérez Grobet.
Edited by: Andrea Folprecht.
Music by: Edward Shearmur.
Released by: Magnolia.
Country of Origin: USA. 114 min. Rated: R.
With: Kathy Baker, Amy Brenneman, Elpidia Carrillo, Glenn Close, Stephen Dillane, Dakota Fanning, William Fichtner, Lisa Gay Hamilton, Holly Hunter, Jason Isaacs, Joe Mantegna, Ian McShane, Molly Parker, Mary Kay Place, Aidan Quinn, Sissy Spacek & Robin Wright Penn.

Through his brief microscopic samples of nine contrasting lives, director Rodrigo Garcia weaves an emotive and eclectic tapestry of female suffering, demonstrating the very relative nature of his concept. For one woman, to suffer is to be imprisoned, separated from her daughter; for another, it rises from a surreal encounter with an ex-boyfriend. A sexually abused woman contemplates suicide after revisiting her childhood home, while a teenage girl sacrifices her educational opportunities to patch up her parents' relationship. Clearly, not each of these situations demonstrates an equal experience of pain, but since the women are separate and blind to each other's worlds, each creates her own distressing reality. It's as if suffering were an essential component of life, one that must exist no matter how perfect circumstances appear otherwise, an anguish that must be fabricated if necessary.

Though each woman is in her individual universe, these nine lives somehow merge - a character in one scene finds herself playing a supporting role in another. Thus, we are immersed in the all-encompassing message - it's a small world after all. "It's only small when we want it to be," responds one woman in a sarcastic retort to a remark made by Lorna (Amy Brenneman). Hers is a peculiar case. Lorna attends the funeral of the wife of her deaf ex-husband, who is still in love with Lorna, who finds herself the subject of much hostility at the service.

Garcia is no stranger to the complex world of women and to the captive nature of the relationships in which they are embedded. His 2000 film, Things You Can Tell Just By Looking at Her, dealt similarly with the lives of five women, inserting thin slivers of each woman's life and her problems into a larger framework. A complaint one might make of Nine Lives is that Garcia tends to over-dramatize each situation, leaving little room for light or hope. He paints a murky picture, and does not employ enough substantially piercing material with which to shade his characters. Thus, some women appear as superficial damsels-in-distress - not the charred silhouettes of agony Garcia likely intended to create. Parisa Vaziri
October 14, 2004