Why The Athena is showing yet another movie that already has hit DVD (with Paradise Now
this makes two) escapes me, but I suppose it is about time one of the best movies of 2005 finally comes to Athens.
Nine Lives is set up as a gimmick, even if the movie isn't: It is composed of nine 12-or-so minute vignettes, each centering around a woman, and each a single continuous shot. In almost every vignette a character from a different one makes his or her way in the story. And not only does it feature A-listers like Glenn Close and Holly Hunter, but there is a profoundly moving surprise ' one I won't reveal here.
The vignettes range from chronicles of the life-changing to those moments right around something big that have that foreshadowing glow; film critic Roger Ebert aptly calls them moments of truth in his review.
What makes Nine Lives so warm and accessible, though, is that it doesn't feel ponderous and depressing; Rodrigo Garcia, the director, often inflects scenes that say volumes about the inner lives of his characters with subtle comic touches. In one vignette, a high school graduate (Amanda Seyfried) fights a tug-of-war between her loyalty to her disabled father and her suppressed desire to go away to college. She jokes with her father in one room and then placates her mother (Sissy Spacek) in another, a gentle rhythm to the scene forming along the way.
The film follows women in a variety of age groups, but its uniting chord looks unflinchingly into moments for women faced with potentially life-altering decisions, but too settled to cross without looking both ways. A later scene reveals another side of Spacek's suburban mom, and a very early vignette follows two ex-lovers through a grocery store as they realize they can't reprise the days when they were 25, ignorant and in love.
Perhaps the most perfectly tuned vignette in the film takes place in a hospital room and subtly unites women from two other stories. Here, a woman (Kathy Baker) about to undergo a mastectomy copes with the frightening surgery ahead of her and the feeling that she is losing some of her womanhood. Her loving husband (Joe Mantegna) smiles and takes her verbal blows as they come.
At worst, the stories in Nine Lives can become morose, as a few do. But at their best, such as the above scene in the hospital, they move along at the pace of life, unafraid of confronting how funny and ironic and painful it can be sometimes. The performances are excellent almost across the board ' only Lisa Gay Hamilton, in the film's third vignette, overacts her way into the mawkish ' and the movie's Steadicam flawlessly makes every twist and turn.
After 90 movies like Magnolia and Crash that contend we are all connected in some way, the premise of Nine Lives initially sounds like another load of what-a-small-world bull. But in Garcia's quiet and unassuming little film, these connections are really a subtle strengthening of the characters ' it is as if they grow outside the confines of their cinematic limitations, showing that they can't be defined by one single scene and will not in our own minds. 17
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Ian McShane and Amanda Seyfried act in "Nine Lives," a series of vignettes playing at The Athena this weekend. Seyfried plays a daughter who is torn between going away to college and taking care of her father (McShane).
