Nine Lives (which came out in 2005 and finally arrived in Edmonton on DVD a couple of weeks ago) consists of nine loosely interlocking segments, each one featuring a different female character, all of them about 12 or 13 minutes long, all of which takes place in real time, all of them filmed in a single, unbroken, unedited take. That makes the film sound like a showcase for its director, Rodrigo Garcia, but in fact Garcia’s hand is almost invisible. Even in the film’s most intricately choreographed sequences, it’s always the acting that you pay attention to. Indeed, what’s remarkable about Nine Lives is the way that it allows its nine leading ladies to explore an exciting kind of acting that would be impossible in any other medium.
Take the film’s most highly praised segment, in which Robin Wright Penn plays a very pregnant woman named Diana who bumps into Damian (Jason Isaacs), an old flame of hers, while shopping at the local supermarket. Diana and Damian haven’t spoken in years and are deeply involved with other people now, but it’s obvious that they still feel tremendous passion for each other, and Diana finds it very difficult to disguise the unprocessed feelings that this surprise encounter are conjuring up inside her. Not an unusual premise for a scene, I suppose, but there’s something especially powerful about seeing it play out at length the way Garcia allows it to here, to see the maze of emotions—anger, confusion, sorrow, regret—flit across her face as she pushes her shopping cart up and down the aisles. It’s like that long closeup Nicole Kidman gets during the celebrated “symphony scene” in Birth—only in motion.
Stage actors get to give long, unedited performances all the time, but they never have the documentary-like quality that the best segments of Nine Lives have—the sense of an actor moving through a large, real-life space, reacting to all sorts of unpredictable variables. And plays never contain the “downtime” that Garcia carefully builds into all nine segments of his film—the small, seemingly improvised moments when the actors are freed from the responsibility of having to move the plot forward or recite carefully scripted dialogue and simply hang out in character with each other, as when Sissy Spacek and Aidan Quinn (playing a pair of guilty, inexperienced adulterers) lounge around making nervous precoital chitchat in their motel room, or when Kathy Baker grouchily bickers with her husband (Joe Mantegna) from her hospital bed moments before she’s due to undergo a mastectomy.
We’ve gotten so used to the normal mode of moviemaking, in which each actor’s performance is kind of a fiction, spliced together from various takes in the editing suite, that it’s kind of startling to see a film like Nine Lives, in which the actors’ rhythms take precedence over those of the editors. The results are often so immediate and compelling that it makes you wonder how many other great film performances have lost their power simply from being cut to pieces. (March 16, 2006)
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