Writer/director Rodrigo Garcia ("Things You Can Tell Just By Looking At Her") constructs his film as nine separate, interlocking vignettes, each shot in real time in a single Steadicam shot of perhaps 10 to 15 minutes. This might seem a little gimmicky, but Garcia's great achievement is that you barely notice; these scenes, each featuring a woman at a crossroads, are so beautifully performed that you get lost in the characters, forgetting the technical feat.

The nine stories, all named for their main characters, are connected: A major character in one vignette will turn up as a minor character in another. Though all are compelling, a few stand out. Sissy Spacek, in "Ruth," carries a world of disappointment in her eyes. She's a middle-age wife and mother, meeting an agreeable drunk at a cheap motel for an affair, and you sense the planning and decisions that went into this assignation; a betrayal of all that she has stood for. In an earlier vignette ("Samantha"), we met Ruth's daughter (Amanda Seyfreid), a sweet-faced teenager trapped in the role of go-between with her unhappy parents.

In "Camille," a woman (Kathy Baker) lies in her hospital bed awaiting cancer surgery, sniping at her patient husband (Joe Mantegna) as she faces the reality of upcoming disfigurement. It's a scene so real you want to turn away, but there's something in their cranky banter that's uplifting; you know, somehow, that they'll get through this together.

``Nine Lives'' has a similar appeal. The title refers to the lives of nine women, each the focus of a roughly 10-minute mini-film shot in a single take.

Some show the women (played by such fine actors as Holly Hunter, Sissy Spacek and Kathy Baker) at moments of high drama -- a violent confrontation, an affair.

Others are ordinary slices of a life. But every film has an intriguing duality: On one hand, they are so detailed that we're conscious that a lot of life comes before the scenes we see and a lot will come after. At the same time, the films are so precisely observant that they seem to show us everything we need to know about these women.

I suspect each viewer will have a different favorite. I loved the Amy Brenneman segment, a surprising portrait of how the heightened emotions people feel at a funeral can make things crazy. And I loved the delicacy and nuances of Robin Wright Penn's performance in a segment about a disturbing encounter at a grocery store.

I got something out of each of the nine lives. Beautifully written and directed by Rodrigo Garcia (whose father is writer Gabriel Garcia Marquez), they make a persuasive case that, as one character says, ``Each woman is a universe.''

In both form and content, Nine Lives feels like a continuation and extension of 2001's Ten Tiny Love Stories, which similarly delved deep into the emotional lives of women with vignettes that at best suggested the cinematic equivalent of superb short stories. The earlier film was composed of monologues captured by long static takes, but here the camera moves about freely to document multi-character stories.

In the strongest of the nine, Robin Wright Penn plays a pregnant mother and wife who unexpectedly bumps into an ex-boyfriend she shared an intense, passionate life with years earlier. Penn's performance and Garciá's incisive writing beautifully capture the excruciating awkwardness of people desperately trying to find a feasible middle ground between the primal emotional intimacy they once shared and the forced civility and strained politeness of people accidentally reconnecting after years apart. Their conversation accordingly slides between arbitrary small talk and heady discussion about the Big Issues that defined their lives and relationship. Several of the other stories explore similar issues and dynamics, particularly the one in which an angry, estranged sister and daughter returns to her family home to hurl accusations, reopen old wounds, and stew in bitterness, much to the discomfort of her more accommodating, conciliatory younger sister.

Depending on your perspective, either there isn't a story or there are too many of them. Nine Lives offers nine misfires, although some are worse than others. One woman spends half her sequence mopping a jail floor. Then there's the grocery store incident, in which a woman re-connects with an old flame in the produce aisle. A distraught daughter comes home to confront a father. A woman and her mate tell inappropriate tales to two friends. A daughter acts as an intermediary between her mother and father. A deaf man wants to have sex with an ex-wife at the funeral of his current wife. A woman wimps out at the last minute during a motel tryst. A wife berates her husband while lying in a bed awaiting breast cancer surgery. And a mother and daughter have a picnic in a cemetery.

Don't be deceived by the above description. Nine Lives isn't as exciting as I have made it sound. It's boring and tedious, and none of the characters is developed beyond the two-dimensional level. It might be interesting to watch someone you know and care about do things like shop and have a graveside picnic, but not strangers. Staying awake through the entirety of this movie requires at least one cup of coffee (preferably more, so you have an excuse to duck out for a bathroom break in the middle). I have heard it said that cinematographer-turned-director Rodrigo Garcia is brave for attempting this experiment. To an extent, I agree. Anyone who places something this off-putting into circulation shows more courage than good sense.

More shocking than the film's pretentiousness and lack of energy is the respectable cast Garcia has gathered: Robin Wright Penn, Jason Issacs, Lisa Gay Hamilton, Holly Hunter, Sissy Spacek, Amy Brenneman, Aidan Quinn, Kathy Baker, Joe Mantegna, Glenn Close, and Dakota Fanning (who looks like she's about seven years old, indicating that her segment may have been filmed some time ago). Yet there's an implicit warning in that. Why would a movie with so many A-list names be distributed by a small company like Magnolia Pictures? Because everyone else passed on it, and deservedly so.

If you're still curious, give Nine Lives a try. By the third life, you'll have come to the conclusion that it's better to walk out than waste the other six.

Because Rodrigo García, the film's abundantly talented writer and director, has chosen to tell numerous stories, their average length is a mere 10 minutes. He proves himself the Raymond Carver of screenwriters, paring the dialogue to essentials.

García knows how to create juicy roles for actresses, and they return the favor with performances of such concentrated intensity that you cannot take your eyes off them. Robin Wright Penn appears as a mother-to-be absentmindedly pushing a grocery cart when she spots a former lover she hasn't heard from in a decade. By her discomfort, Wright Penn immediately communicates that this is the one who got away. She tries moving to another aisle, but there he is again, reminding her of what might have been.

Sissy Spacek is another standout as a long-married woman who's become caretaker to her wheelchair-using husband. Much thought has been put into giving her (as well as the eight other principal characters) a fitting name -- Ruth, with all the biblical weight it carries. The film catches Ruth about to break one of the Ten Commandments. She's checked into a motel with another man. She attempts to act carefree, but Spacek's looks and gestures indicate the toll the tryst takes on the character.

Men are an integral part of these women's lives, leaving opportunities for actors such as Joe Mantegna to shine. He plays the husband of a woman (Kathy Baker) about to undergo a mastectomy who vents her anger on her devoted mate. Mantegna, whose long association with David Mamet has taught him the power of silence, allows her to rant about how she's come to hate his guts.

With the help of a Steadicam to stabilize the camera's movement, each of the film's nine sequences was shot in an unbroken take. This must have been enormously freeing for screen actors used to working in stops and starts. The vignettes that primarily involve two people have the feel of a set piece. But García, who began his career as a cinematographer on "Mi Vida Loca" and "Gia," keeps the action moving, so "Nine Lives" never seem static, like a stage performance. It feels like real life, in nine acts.

This film, written and directed by Rodrigo Garcia ("Things You Can Tell by Just Looking at Her"), is more notable than most of its ilk for its periodic intensity, its variety of strong performances and its virtuosic camerawork. But it still has that arbitrary feel underscored by the fact that we can count off how many vignettes remain and can't help but notice how tenuous and insignificant the connections between the episodes often are.

In effect, the film is a series of portraits of nine women at a crisis point: a jailed mother (Elpidia Carillo) denied a visit from her daughter; a pregnant woman (Robin Wright Penn) bumping into an old flame; a distraught young woman (Lisa Gay Hamilton) working up the courage to confront her abusive father; a woman (Kathy Baker) about to undergo a mastectomy; and so on.

There are other stories -- five to be exact -- but these are the most convincing and compelling, and the film's chief boast is that it hosts such a variety of top-notch performances that are all the more impressive because of Garcia's insistence on shooting in long, breathless shots.

In particular, Wright Penn and Hamilton sizzle in drastically different ways, the former morphing through something like a dozen emotions as she wends her way through a supermarket, the latter ready to explode as she dares enter her childhood home and face her worst memories. Other set-pieces, such as those featuring Holly Hunter as a woman shamed by a creepy boyfriend and Amy Brenneman attending the funeral of her deaf ex-husband's second wife, aren't given enough time to make a coherent impact. And a couple are just flat.

The film is hurt by having its best pieces loaded toward the front, meaning that we tick off the number of remaining lives with more purpose just when we should be most absorbed. But the snaky cinematography pulls you through even when the writing doesn't, and the best performances keep you hoping that you'll feel the next one or the one after that just as powerfully.

The gimmick is telling 10-minute tales in single, sustained takes, the equivalent of performing without a net. The artistry is in how effective it is, especially the acting.

Writer-director Rodrigo Garcia had other things to worry about, of course, from the intricate timing of blocking his cast to the roving camera work needed to catch them.

Whatever -- it seems to work. The brief, unrelated shards of women's lives we see in the new film are dark, harrowing, and acted with pinpoint skill, but taken as a whole ''Nine Lives" avoids larger statements. That's a good thing. Unlike Rebecca Miller in her similar ''Personal Velocity" (2002), Garcia is content to let each vignette speak acidly for itself, and to let us fill in the blanks of female distress on our own.

In a sense, these are high-octane acting exercises, and their various impacts depend on the performers, their predicaments, and what the individual viewer brings to them. Other critics have cited the opening sequence, featuring Elpidia Carrillo as an LA County Jail inmate losing her grip, as the finest in the movie, whereas it struck this writer as the most heavy-handed. By contrast, the next ''life" is a bare-bones knockout about an upscale expectant mother (Robin Wright Penn) running into an ex-lover (Jason Isaacs) while grocery shopping. As Garcia's camera follows her in circles around the aisles, Penn gives a master class in love, lust, anger, sorrow, and pain.

The segments bump up against each other in unpredictable ways, like strangers who keep crossing paths. A resonant family scene among a disabled dad (Ian McShane), his patient wife (Sissy Spacek), and the luminous teenage daughter (Amanda Seyfried) who loves him and hates her roils with unspoken emotion; later, we see Spacek's character in a motel with her lover, a boozy philosopher played by Aidan Quinn. The prison guard from the opening sequence (Miguel Sandoval) reappears as the father of a distraught woman (Lisa Gay Hamilton), who reappears as the nurse of a tetchy cancer patient (Kathy Baker, excellent). The movie says we never see the threads that connect us all.

Two segments deserve special mention. In one, Amy Brenneman plays a woman at the funeral of her ex-husband's second wife; the ex (William Fichtner) is deaf and still hasn't gotten over her, leading to a small, absurdly funny explosion of bad behavior. In the final scene, a mother (Glenn Close) and her young daughter (Dakota Fanning) have a picnic in a cemetery, and the mood is both light and mournful for reasons you may miss if you're not paying attention.

Garcia, a former cinematographer, is the son of the legendary Colombian novelist Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and his heart-struck miniatures are the opposite of his father's ripe and teeming work. Not all of ''Nine Lives" clicks, but at its best it finds an inarticulate sisterly solace that makes you want to see what this director could do with one life per film.

Sandra (Elpidia Carrillo) is in jail and all she wants is to have a conversation with her daughter on visiting day.
Diana (Robin Wright Penn) is married and pregnant when she bumps into an old boyfriend (Jason Isaacs) in the grocery store, and is confused by the wealth of emotions it brings up for her.
Holly (Lisa Gay Hamilton) comes home to confront her stepfather.
Sonia (Holly Hunter) and Martin (Stephen Dillane) visit friends, but start fighting and share way too many of their secrets.
Samantha (Amanda Seyfried) is barely out of high school, but it’s on her shoulders to hold her family together, acting as the go-between for her parents.
Lorna (Amy Brenneman) attends the funeral of her ex-husband’s new wife; Lorna and Andrew (William Fichtner) realize they still have feelings for each other. (Includes some very racy sign language.)
Ruth (Sissy Spacek) is tired of her married life and goes to a seedy motel with Henry (Aidan Quinn) to have an affair.
Camille (Kathy Baker) is facing surgery and is overwhelmed by the feeling of helplessness. Even the comfort of her husband Richard (Joe Mantegna) can’t dispel her fear and anger.
Maggie (Glenn Close) takes her daughter Maria (Dakota Fanning) for their annual picnic at the cemetery. They don’t dwell on the fact that they’re visiting the gravesite of a husband/father, but it’s right there under the surface.

Most of these stories resonant with a certain realness, a few stand out as exceptionally powerful thanks to the performances of Robin Wright Penn, Lisa Gay Hamilton, and Kathy Baker. Each segment is done in one continuous take, which demands a lot of range for the actresses, but they all are up to the challenge. The downside is that just as you are really getting involved in a story, they shift gears to the next one.

Garcia, who most people would be familiar with for his "Things You Can Tell Just by Looking at Her," continues to delve into the female psyche with characters who cross paths into less significant roles in each others' stories. A sextet of returning actors (Close, Brenneman, Hunter, Baker, Carrillo and Sandoval) join an extensive ensemble to create brief snatches of real life.

Garcia's romantic entanglements generally are stronger than his familial complexities. Robin Wright Penn ("A Home at the End of the World") is excellent as a heavily pregnant wife whose life is thrown off its orbit when she runs into the former lover (Jason Isaacs, "Peter Pan") who obviously was her great passion. Damian returns as one half of a couple who is hosting close friends in their new home. His wife Lisa (Molly Parker, HBO's "Deadwood") is guardedly skeptical about her friend Sonia's (Holly Hunter, "Thirteen") choice of mate, and by the time the four have drunk a toast, she's proven right. Martin (Stephen Dillane, "King Arthur") goes out of his way to one-up a perceived betrayal by Sonia in an excruciatingly uncomfortable moment. Another is served up when Lisa attends the wake of a friend and is appalled to see the ex-wife of the suicide's husband in attendance. Lorna (Amy Brenneman, TV's "Judging Amy") makes an innocent show of caring for her deaf/mute ex Andrew's (William Fichtner, "Crash") loss, but in reality she glories in the sexual power she holds over him, a grasp that clearly drove the deceased to end her life. Sissy Spacek stars in the weakest of the romance snippets as a woman on the verge of cheating on her husband.

Spacek's Ruth crosses paths with three other stories, two significantly. She's the mother of only child Samantha (Amanda Seyfried, "Mean Girls") who is pitted between parents who burden her with the health of their family. Dad (an almost unrecognizable Ian McShane of HBO's "Deadwood") is wheelchair bound with a debilitating disease and mom is worn down from years of care. Samantha has a flirtatious relationship with her father but is exasperated by her mom, fairly typical for a teenage girl. Garcia's writing and concept are intriguing here, but his blocking, with Samantha constantly walking back and forth between her mother in one room and her father in another, perhaps meant to evoke weariness instead becomes annoying. Ruth also witnesses the arrest of Sandra (Elpidia Carrillo, "A Day Without a Mexican"), the subject of Garcia's first segment about a female inmate who becomes hysterical when denied verbal access to her daughter during a monthly visit. Sandra's guard Ron (Miguel Sandoval, "Ballistic: Ecks vs. Sever") turns out to be the father of Holly (Lisa Gay Hamilton, "Beloved") a woman totally bound up in the childhood trauma he caused her. Hamilton is too mannered and fussy in her portrayal to make this segment work, but Garcia wraps it with a punch. Perhaps the most emotional ending is saved for the omnibus's last. Maggie (Glenn Close, "Heights") takes her much younger daughter Maria (Dakota Fanning, "The War of the Worlds") on her annual visit to the cemetery, which she turns into a picnic to keep her child amused. The over-protective mother is clearly coping with a heavy burden (like Ruth, she proclaims her exhaustion) that her buoyant daughter distracts her from. Only Maggie's story features no characters from another, nor does she appear in any of the other eight.

Garcia has orchestrated some terrific performances in these single long takes and his work with cameraman Xavier Pérez Grobet ("The Woodsman") is so well choreographed one almost doesn't notice the lack of cuts. In one startling move, a 360 degree pan changes everything. Almost all of the stories end abruptly, almost as if the camera was turned off in the middle of a sentence or movement. When it's used initially in Sandra's segment, it seems awkward, jolting one out of the moment, but the device eventually adds to the genuine feeling of experiencing real slices of life - Garcia just plunks us into situations already in progress, then we orient ourselves and becomes flies on the wall. His writing here is sharp. 'Five minutes with you and I feel like my life's a figment of my imagination' - Diana (Wright Penn) sums up her turmoil with words as accurate as a surgeon's knife. The repetitions in 'Samantha,' some identical others paraphrased, form the seesaw of her parents that she keeps in balance. Even the use of a four-letter word contains a deeper meaning, a clue.

While not every story works as well as others (Kathy Baker's Camille is the one I've neglected to mention. She's good, but hers is the least easy to categorize, a woman about to lose a breast to cancer who is angry at the world), the whole forms a rich experience. "Nine Lives" is like a concept album, where even the order of play affects the emotional outcome.

The characters are diverse: a rage-filled Latino woman (Elpidia Carrillo) struggling to stay on good behavior in an L.A. County prison; a married woman (Robin Wright Penn) shaken by a chance encounter with an old lover; the teenage daughter (Amanda Seyfried) of parents who only converse through her; a miserable middle-age wife and mother (a heartbreakingly fragile Sissy Spacek) in an affair with a charming younger man.

Other chapters are carried by Lisa Gay Hamilton, Holly Hunter, Amy Brenneman, Kathy Baker, Glenn Close, Dakota Fanning and the rich supporting cast around them.

Each story is shot in a single, graceful long take, carving it out as a contained slice of their life. Yet characters drift across the vignettes, creating not so much dramatic connections as a sense that these lives co-exist and touch, however briefly or tangentially.

And his dialogue has a slightly rarefied quality; introspective with a bruised feel and a literary beauty ("We're nothing. We're dreams and bones."). This beautifully sculpted poetic naturalism has more in common with the expressive use of words in the great screenplays of '40s and '50s than with modern movies.

Garcia is fascinated by the inner lives of women and his compassion and empathy bring them alive in these vignettes, these brief but intimate character sketches in a 12-minute or so span of life. Even in their most troubled, vulnerable, panicked moments, he reveals grace and beauty and honesty and raw humanity, perhaps especially in those moments of duress.

But the stories also take the audience on a journey, from rage and anger to connection and peace, a life cycle told through the moments of time from nine women who have nothing in common but their struggles, their search for happiness and their connection to the tapestry of humanity.

In another aisle, they meet again. Not by accident. There is more to be said, but not very much that can be safely said without an enormous upheaval in their lives. It is clear to us, perhaps to them, that they should never have broken up. No matter what has happened, no matter who they married, he says, "we're Damian and Diana." That will never change.

Thank God "Nine Lives" is an episodic film, so everything they have to say or do has to be contained in about 12 minutes. To know why they broke up or to see them get back together would involve us in a full-length love story of the sort we are familiar with.

It might be a good one. But here, in this meeting that is seen in one unbroken shot in a supermarket, we see the crucial heart of their relationship. It is based on the truth that their lives have moved on. Perhaps they should have stayed together. But they didn't. It's not important to know whether they start seeing each other again. But it is important for them to know that they want to, because to live without that knowledge is to dishonor their real feelings.

This little story, starring Robin Wright Penn and Jason Isaacs, is told in "Nine Lives," a collection of nine vignettes written and directed by Rodrigo Garcia. Each one contains a moment of truth, each one is about the same length, each one is told in a single shot, although the camera work isn't showy.

Sometimes the episodes seem obvious at first. Kathy Baker plays a woman who will undergo breast surgery in a few hours. In her hospital bed, she is frightened and angry; she's short-tempered with the nurses, and hard on her husband (Joe Mantegna). A nurse adds a sedative to her IV drip, and she grows calmer and then -- well, happy. She sees the good in things. The sedative has done its work.

But the episode is about so much more than that. It is about the indignity of surgeons inserting knives into your unconscious body, and about the fear of loss, and the impersonality of hospitals but the humanity of nurses, and the patience and love of her husband. Was she acting bitchy? When you're about to get a breast removed, you're not going for a good grade in deportment. Sometimes we behave badly for the best reasons in the world, and this movie knows that.

Other scenes. There is a prisoner (Elpidia Carrillo), who gets crazy because this is visitor's day and her daughter is on the other side of the glass, and the telephone doesn't work. An angry daughter (Lisa Gay Hamilton), who returns after a long absence to the home where she was raised and abused. This woman, so wounded, so borderline, is the same woman who, we discover in the hospital scene, is the nurse who is gentle and cares. Sissy Spacek plays a despairing mother in a dysfunctional household in one segment, and turns up in another prepared, perhaps, to have a forbidden night in a motel with Aidan Quinn. Glenn Close and Dakota Fanning visit a cemetery together in the last story, where the final shot will blindside you.

There is notoriously not a market for short films. You can't book them or advertise them, it's impossible to try to review them (and besides, where can the readers see them?). But short films are a form with purpose, just as short stories are. Some stories need only introduce us to a character or two and spend enough time with them for us to discover something about their natures, and perhaps our natures. The greatest short story writers, like William Trevor and Alice Munro, can awe us; their stories are short but not small.

NINE LIVES, by writer and director Rodrigo García, whose previous film was TEN TINY LOVE STORIES, uses the medium of the short film to construct a full length motion picture. Diana's story is but one of nine such stories of women and the people around them. All the stories were filmed in one single take. Some of the stories share some common supporting characters, but the script doesn't use the structure of SHORT CUTS or CRASH, in which the stories are all tightly intertwined. In NINE LIVES, the stories almost all stand alone and could be viewed independently. What they share most of all is a strong sense of place -- one is set in a jail and another in funeral parlor -- and an absolute honesty. All of the characters are genuine and most are touching in various ways.

In another strong story, Richard (Joe Mantegna), the husband of Camille (Kathy Baker), an angry and anxious woman about to undergo a mastectomy, have a discussion just as she is about to enter the operating room. "We're nothing," she argues. "We're dreams and bones." She goes on to complain about how we are at the mercy of strangers. But having a positive outlook and not about to be operated on himself, her husband responds to her with quiet assurance and confidence, "We're not at the mercy of each other. We're connected."

You'll be connected to the stories, all nine little gems. My only warning is not to expect a final wrap-up in the ending sequence, since this story featuring Glenn Close and Dakota Fanning has no link with the previous stories. But, as a story, it is another fine one.

Nine women tenuously connected by friends and fate are represented by short but powerful vignettes on love, loss, fear, anxiety and commitment. The camera swoops in on lives in progress, making itself at home for ten minutes plus and creeping out without closure but with a heady sense of continuation.

Powerhouse actresses take a stand with understated sway. A pregnant Robin Wright Penn runs into an old lover at the grocery store and burns with fragmentary longing. Sissy Spacek is torn between guilt and desire as she stands on the threshold of adultery.

Holly Hunter listens in apprehension as her main squeeze details their most intimate moments to friends while brilliant student Amanda Seyfriend is being crushed by the incessant the needs of her disabled dad and co-dependent mom.

These fleeting chapters are awash in the heightened state of emotion that is distinctly woman. Director Rodrigo García shoots each sketch in a single continuous take; no break in the consistency of sorrow or sentiment.

The men get their day in the sun too, a cornucopia of male talent from Joe Mantegna and Jason Isaacs to Stephen Dillane and Aidan Quinn.

Set-ups and pacing are intense and unfeigned; no smoke and mirrors and no Hollywood endings. Back-to-back interludes feel a bit lengthy but can’t dim the sensibility: I am woman, hear me roar.

The vignettes have two quirks. First, each one is filmed in one unbroken take. (Oddly enough, it arrives in New York at the same time as a French festival film, "Through the Forest, which indulges in exactly the same gimmick.) The film gains almost nothing from this approach, and it doesn't lose much from it either. It's just a little extra challenge to the filmmaker.

Second, the characters start to overlap into one another's lives after a few segments. This is also fine but frequently irrelevant. It does sometimes deepen our appreciation of a character — for instance, the hard-bitten jail guard who also, as it turns out, has a complex home life. But the whole movie doesn't weave itself into a single tapestry — it just taps you on the shoulder from time to time and checks your powers of observation. Nice, but not essential.

A couple of the stories I didn't appreciate. The one with Lisa Gay Hamilton as a woman with a bad past relationship with her father who comes back to confront him. It was fairly obvious what had happened to her at the hands of her father, but her actions seemed strange. Why did she come back now? If she loved her sister so much, why did she leave her behind? Was there something else going on I didn't see? Then there was the story with Amy Brenneman going to the funeral of her deaf ex-husband's second wife. First off, that relationship was strange. Why was he deaf? Was there a reason behind that? I never saw why those two were together, why their relationship was so strong. And their resolution at the end was a bit too much for me. The other stories had their moments as well that you could take or leave.

It took me until the second story to realize that the entire sequence was one single shot. I think that's one reason why all the main characters were top of the line actors and not necessarily 'popular' ones. You need people who can not only memorize lines, but can memorize movement and feel. Sometimes it's not as hard to shoot single shots if there's not a lot happening and people are standing around talking. But when you're in a grocery store and there are people in the background you have to worry about as well as moving in and out of the aisles, it can be difficult. So it's impressive that you don't really notice anything different and yet at the same time, you feel closer to the people than you do in a normal film. There are no quick cuts back and forth for reactions, you actually feel like you're right there with the characters, watching this from up close. It makes the movie seem warmer and pulls you in to the stories. It was a brave choice and one that paid off.

Nine Lives is really a series of nine short films featuring nine female characters. Each vignette consists of a 10-14 minute emotionally charged slice of the character's life, shot elegantly and inventively in a single continuous take. Reportedly filmed in just 18 days (2 days per story), the approach is exhilarating rather than gimmicky, and the actors seem to relish the challenge, giving full-blooded, convincing performances that seldom ring a false note.

The movie opens in the claustrophobic corridor of a women's prison, and we are introduced to an inmate named Sandra. Played with sullen intensity by Elpidia Carillo (also in Garcia's Things You Can Tell by Looking at Her), Sandra works feverishly to earn the privileges "good behavior" can buy her, only to erupt in rage when her monthly visit with her young daughter is sabotaged by a malfunctioning prison phone. In the 12-14 minutes Garcia spends on Sandra, we are given a nuanced and powerful study of conflicting emotions—regret, defiance, grim determination, longing, and despair.

The stories that follow move from Sandra's literal prison to a variety of emotional ones. Robin Wright Penn (White Oleander, Message in a Bottle) gives arguably the film's finest performance as Diana, a married woman pregnant with her first child who becomes completely disoriented when she runs into her old flame Damian (Jason Isaacs) in a grocery store. The confusion of tension and attraction between Diana and Damian is palpable and unexpectedly moving.

Next we meet Holly, an emotionally distraught young woman played by Lisa Gay Hamilton (TV's The Practice). Holly returns to her childhood home and waits, troubled and manic, to confront her stepfather over serious traumas inflicted in the past. For my taste, there are a few over-the-top moments in this episode, but it could be argued that Holly is dealing with an over-the-top situation that makes her unraveling believable and even appropriate.

The fourth vignette features Sonia (the always affecting Holly Hunter) and her boyfriend Martin (Stephen Dillane). The camera follows the couple on a visit to see their friends' posh new apartment, winding down long hallways and into the elevator, where we suffer through Sonia's claustrophobia with her. In Sonia's story, the tension is less overtly dramatic than in some of the other scenes, but the emotional impact is no less shattering when Martin vindictively reveals a wounding secret to the couple's friends.

Nine Lives' next chapter stars Amanda Seyfried (Mean Girls) as Samantha, a teenager torn between two needy and politely estranged parents. Samantha's wheelchair-bound father, Larry (Ian McShane), and emotionally-drained mother, Ruth (Sissy Spacek), assure her they'll be fine if she leaves home for college, and yet they can't seem to give her the space she needs to travel from the kitchen to the privacy of her bedroom.

The film's sixth story revolves around Lorna (Amy Brenneman), who attends the funeral of her ex-husband Andrew's second wife and discovers that many of the mourners blame her for the suicidal death. Andrew's inappropriate but urgent sexual advances further complicate the situation.

In his seventh vignette, Garcia circles back to Ruth (Spacek) and lets us see more deeply into her conflicted life. While daughter Samantha and crippled-husband Larry are presumably at home, Ruth is entering into a hotel room and potential adultery with a gregarious suitor named Henry (Aidan Quinn).

Ten minutes later we meet Camille (Kathy Baker), a cancer patient who rants generally at the world and specifically at her husband Richard (Joe Mantegna) as medical staff prepare her for a mastectomy. Camille's terror and rage have her jumping out of her skin, but as tranquilizers take their effect her face softens and we catch a glimpse of the woman she is in health. In one of Nine Lives' most tender moments, we also see Richard's love and aching concern for his wife.

In the final act Garcia gives us Maggie (Glenn Close) and her daughter Maria (Dakota Fanning), engrossed in easy and tender conversation during a graveside picnic. Both actors inhabit and imbue the scene with understated grace.

There are few obvious connections between the nine lives in the film, at least circumstantially. In fact, the stories are so complete unto themselves that the odd time a character does overlap (Sandra's prison guard is Holly's stepfather, for example), the connection is more distracting than cohesive. That Garcia manages to give us such distinct and engrossing characters in each story is a filmmaking triumph, but it also asks a lot of the viewer. We've just settled into one world and we're jolted into another—nine times.

Occasionally I found myself longing for some plot development or the articulation of an idea that would tie all of the chapters of Nine Lives together. Yet I was ultimately frustrated by the film's few attempts to express an overt overarching philosophy. Henry offers up some folk-wisdom about the connection between all people, Maria asks about the nine lives of a cat, Maggie affirms that "we all go on"—but none of these larger statements ring as true as the smaller, more nuanced moments that make each scene so believable. It's tempting to say that Garcia—the son of acclaimed Columbian novelist Gabriel Garcia Marquez (One Hundred Years of Solitude, Love in the Time of Cholera)—is a better storyteller than he is a philosophy teacher. And yet I suspect there is plenty of philosophy seeping through the stories that Garcia tells. There is an abundance of tension, conflict, resilience, sexual attraction and familial love in the nine lives Garcia offers for our inspection. But in all of the film's ultra-natural dialogue, there is a distinct void of anything super-natural—of any suggestion that there is help or hope beyond our own wills and choices. Such an ideology leaves a reviewer with my bent toward faith in a quandary. Here is a film chock full of astonishing performances, inventive cinematography and superbly crafted writing. It is, in a word, transcendent. And yet it leaves me dissatisfied because I suspect it aims to tell me that there is no transcendence at all, only a reality exclusively of our own making.

Watching Nine Lives had me tense, engaged, sometimes disgusted, sometimes moved, and always interested. It reminded me of a collection of Flannery O'Connor short stories I keep around to read when I'm feeling brave. Like O'Connor, Garcia possesses a rare gift for developing character in a concise and economical way, the courage to look life's darker realities square in the eye, and an ability to find something of the spirit even in the midst of pain. But where the spirit O'Connor finds is holy, Garcia's is human. He's an ingenious and eloquent storyteller. But he leaves me wanting more.

A collection of vignettes that are sewn together like a patchwork quilt, this film keeps you looking for the common thread. This movie shows the ugly and private little corners within the lives of nine different women. As the film progresses we see that every character has two faces (at least). One face is shown to the world, and the other in what they feel is private or safe. It’s as if we are tagging along with these strangers during their most mundane and unglamorous moments. We see them grocery shopping, arguing, deciding, threatening, and just ‘getting by.’

My favorite performance was delivered by Robin Wright Penn. I loved her graceful gradation in emotion. Her character slipped gradually from cheerful and upbeat in reuniting with her long-time ex-boyfriend to an uncontrollable panic. Within all of these characters we are only given the present situation with no back-story, only the present in all its glory. The story slowly reveals itself as life’s ironic tapestry.

This film is carried by such celebrity heavyweights as Robin Wright-Penn, Dakota Fanning, Glenn Close, Holly Hunter and Sissy Spacek. They all act out the most life-changing moments and decisions of their existence, which all masquerade as disconnected occurrences.
This film is shot very much in the way that Elephant was made. We are shown several ‘separate’ lives of very different individuals, and then slowly we’re allowed to understand how they all affect and bind into one another. The camera work is very loose and appears to be free of any glamour or gloss that we usually find. The shots in this movie are so candid in their attachment to each woman that it imposes a realistic quality. There doesn’t appear to be any rehearsal or preparation, only a coincidental filming of life in progress. That is the genius of this film.

The subject matter for this film made me wonder where it came from. I don’t feel that the instances in this movie were imagined, but rather that they were experienced and then transformed into a cinematic tale of lonely and frightened people.

The script for this movie was well written in that the words flowed comfortably and easily. The conversations and the outbursts were rational in their capture of the spectrum of human emotion. The only criticism I have is that there was no climax or true feeling of closure at any point.

The effect that it had on me was one of a wash of melancholy. I felt that I hadn’t truly learned a life-changing lesson, nor had I noticed any sort of resolve. In that sense I left the film feeling much like the characters, unsatisfied... which I suppose may have been the very point.

Ordinarily, it takes filmmakers the entire running time of their movie - and then some - to generate some real empathy for the characters whose lives audiences witness. Not so with director Garcia, who – much like his work on The Sopranos, Six Feet Under and Carnivale - deals with each of his scenes like they’re the only one. And in a way, while on screen, they are. By the time each vignette is complete, we’ve scarcely scratched the surface of the characters’ problems, much less how to solve them; but Garcia is able to render their experiences so vividly that we’re completely ensconced in the business of what happens next.

At the same time, the end of each scene doesn’t arrive too early, or too late. In the sequence with Diana, for example, the exchange between these two former lovers is potent with familiarity and foreignness, as if their shared past creates both a bond and barrier between them. When they almost succumb to those febrile feelings that once possessed them - and mind you, not in any kind of clichéd or perfunctory way - we feel the emotional need they share rather than mere physical chemistry, or worse yet, the rote execution of an ‘awkward reunion’ scene. So when Diana rushes headlong to find him, knowing full well the futility and foolishness of her desire, only to be cut off before she locates him, we’re as devastated as she is. We’re left with the aftertaste of a relationship that will never quite be resolved, no doubt just as it would be in real life.

That said, not all of the stories work quite as effectively. While Samantha’s endless volleys between her injured father (Ian McShane, centuries away from his conspiratorial Deadwood character Al Swearengen) and constrained mother (Spacek again) finds a realistic, plodding rhythm, it proves exhausting to the viewer as well, and offers no reprieve from this girl’s poor and likely permanent parental torment. Similar is the case with Hamilton’s scene as Holly, a young woman whose insistence on a terrible past quickly becomes called into question as she continues to rant and rave in increasingly nonsensical fashion. By the time her confrontation has arrived, we again are invested in the characters’ fates, and the film offers no sense of comfort or clarity to assuage her - or our - sense that the events she recalls may or may not have happened.

But overall, the film is a remarkable achievement if for no other reason that its assembly of superlative performances: Wright Penn offers powerful, conflicted passion as a pregnant wife who can’t relinquish her past; Brenneman shines as a wife whose guilt binds her to her ex-husband; Close reins in the impulse to act big and childish against a talented child actor and delivers a subtle portrait of parental sacrifice; and Kathy Baker deserves and Oscar nomination for juggling so many different feelings during her slow, reluctant acquiescence to the drugs that may likely save her life.

Nine Lives isn’t like, say, this summer’s overlooked pleasure Happy Endings, or any of a dozen ‘ensemble pieces’ that find a broad cast of characters inextricably linked through small personal details. Rather, Garcia finds nine women of different backgrounds, lifestyles, and most importantly, personal problems, finds the emotional link between them, and explores that to singular and yet universal effect.

So fluid in fact is his series of stories that the audience is devastated by one sequence, uplifted by the next, and perplexed by the one after that. And, at the same time, captivated by all.

Like our nine real-world lives, there’s much more to behold in Garcia’s treatise, even after the first experience is over and done with. So while this independent production may be nudged over to most moviegoers’ Netflix lists, it’s worth giving this one a big screen chance.

How does he do it? For starters, he has at his command some of the best (though not always the best-known) actresses working. Robin Penn Wright as a pregnant wife who runs into an old flame (Jason Isaacs) in a market, an encounter that upends her stable life. The astonishing Lisa Gay Hamilton as a distraught woman coming home to face the stepfather who committed some terrible act against her. Sissy Spacek as a mother and wife contemplating an infidelity with Aidan Quinn in a motel room. Elpida Carrillo as a prisoner trying to see her visiting daughter. Holly Hunter out with her boyfriend (Stephen Dillane) for an evening with friends that turns into an unexpected psychodrama. Amy Brennerman confronting and seducing her deaf ex-lover at his wife’s funeral. Amanda Seyfried as a homebound daughter stuck playing mediator between her sickly father (Ian MacShane) and frustrated mother (Spacek). Kathy Baker angrily, fearfully facing an operation with her husband (Joe Mantegna) at her abusive side. Glenn Close and Dakota Fanning enacting a deceptive mother-daughter ritual at a cemetery. It's a master class in acting.

And in screenwriting. Garcia instinctively grasps what the photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson called "the decisive moment." His 10-minute snapshots seem to locate the heart of every scene. I'm not sure how Garcia makes these vignettes so urgent, and so satisfying, in such little time. He seems to have an almost clairvoyant grasp of character, and the ability to reveal a complete personality in cinematic shorthand. The son of Gabriel Garcia Marquez (is his storytelling sense genetically implanted?), Garcia is drawn to "miniatures" and to stories of women: his first film had a similar form, the lovely "Things You Can Tell Just By Looking at Her," which also featured Hunter, Close and Baker. The men's roles here may not be as ample, but they are equally well written. I say give the whole cast a truckload of Oscars.

Each sequence, unfolding powerfully in a single take, links deftly to the next with a smooth yet driving momentum, and individuals from one vignette turn up in another in an unobtrusive, credible manner that plays down coincidence to suggest instead the not-always-apparent interconnectedness in people's lives.

Each segment seems perfectly shaped and timed, not lasting a second too long yet always of sufficient length to be satisfying in itself. García's large ensemble cast is impeccable, and he and his actors have created a film as memorable as it is subtle.

An especially fine example of García's masterly control in developing a scene to its fullest is his second episode in which Robin Wright Penn's very pregnant Diana, while shopping at a Bel-Air gourmet grocery, encounters her first love, Damian (Jason Isaacs), whose inability to commit ended their relationship a decade earlier. Even though Damian has married, as has Diana, he instantly realizes he has never stopped loving her, and in his regret, selfishly resolves to force her to acknowledge that she feels the same way about him.

Damian starts out in a low enough key that Diana, though thrown by running into him, is finding the chance meeting pleasant enough until he starts bearing down on her. Diana therefore finds herself in a very public place having to confront an unexpected and painful truth and then rise above it, holding on to her dignity and determination all the same. Wright Penn beautifully reveals Diana's increasing inner turmoil along with her determination not to lose her self-control.

An especially harrowing sequence finds Lisa Gay Hamilton's Holly returning to her family home, waiting for her stepfather (Miguel Sandoval) to return from work, for a major showdown. In the meantime she has an anguished conversation with her younger sister Vanessa (Sydney Tamiia Poitier), whom she virtually raised, and it becomes clear that Holly has reached a point where she cannot move on with her life until she confronts her stepfather over what is pretty clearly his sexual abuse of her.

A composed and kindly Holly turns up in the penultimate sequence as a nurse in a hospital where Kathy Baker's Camille is struggling to face up to the loss of a breast to cancer while being gently comforted by her husband (Joe Mantegna). The final sequence seems aptly placed, where a recent widow (Glenn Close) has taken her young daughter (Dakota Fanning) to visit her husband's grave. This exceptionally subtle sequence finds the mother, acknowledging the eternal cycle of life and death, focusing on creating a positive experience for her daughter but instead discovering how badly she needs the child's loving comfort.

Other episodes find a teenager (Amanda Seyfried) attending to her wheelchair-using father (Ian McShane) so closely that he becomes concerned that she will sacrifice her life to his care while his wife (Sissy Spacek) secretly drifts toward infidelity (with Aidan Quinn). Holly Hunter's Sonia suddenly finds her lover (Stephen Dillane) revealing an intimate secret to another couple with whom they are having dinner.

"Nine Lives" is a sophisticated, elegant-looking film shot in distinctive, wide-ranging L.A. locales, but its real terrain is the human heart, explored with compassion and respect.

Garcia, the son of novelist Gabriel Garcia Marquez, has done this sort of thing before, in both his debut, "Things You Can Tell Just by Looking at Her," and its follow-up, "Ten Tiny Love Stories." There is some overlap in the stories here in "Nine Lives," but, for the most part, it isn't particularly significant. The commonality comes more with the types of events depicted - invariably, they are disappointments - and the way the women respond with strength and resilience.

Sandra (Elpidia Carrillo) finds herself in jail, trying to be a model citizen but bursting into a rage when she can't connect with her visiting child. Diana (Robin Wright Penn) meets an old lover in a grocery store. (Shades of Dan Fogelberg.) Holly (Lisa Gay Hamilton) deals with an abusive past; Sonia (Holly Hunter) copes with an indifferent boyfriend.

A teen girl (Amanda Seyfried) tries to please her parents, who use their daughter to communicate with each other. Lorna (Amy Brenneman) deals with her ex-husband at the funeral of the woman who followed her. Ruth (Sissy Spacek) mulls over adultery; Maggie (Glenn Close) and Camille (Kathy Baker) ponder mortality.

Some of the material veers into disease-of-the-week territory; other stories (namely the Brenneman episode) are merely pointless. But the best of the lot - the lovely Wright Penn having her life turned upside down, Hamilton teetering on the edge of oblivion while confronting the ghosts of her childhood - are powerfully intense mini-dramas that leave you breathless when they fade to black. At least a few of these "Nine" are very fine.

Really short ones.

His first feature-length anthology, 2000's well-reviewed "Things You Can Tell Just by Looking at Her," strung together five tales of women dealing with various life crises.

His second, "Ten Tiny Love Stories," was a playful string of monologues, by women looking into the camera and revealing things about sex and love that have moved them.

Now comes "Nine Lives," a fascinating series of vignettes - or snapshots, as he calls them - catching women at a particular moment of emotional duress. Each piece is filmed in one continuous take, with hand-held cameras following the actors through some often complicated movements.

Though a few characters show up in more than one story, the nine tales do not create a mosaic. Instead, they are sharp slices of life's little tortures - the spasms of emotional pain, nostalgia or frustration felt by its cast of women.

In the story titled "Camille," Kathy Baker plays a woman being prepared for breast surgery in a hospital, taking out her anxiety on her husband (Joe Mantegna). Her anesthesiologist is Holly (Lisa Gay Hamilton), who appears in an earlier vignette as a badly agitated woman forcing a confrontation with her abusive father.

Sissy Spacek plays Ruth, an invalid's wife having second thoughts about a motel tryst with a man (Aidan Quinn) she has just met, while in "Diana," Robin Wright Penn plays a pregnant woman who runs into a former lover in a supermarket and is nearly overwhelmed by the feelings that rush to her.

A couple of the stories don't quite live up to the film's overall three-star rating, but most are poignant, disturbing and superbly acted.

The picture is a collection of vignettes shot without edits, the camera following characters through cathartic moments in one fluid take. Nine scenes focus on nine different female protagonists, women whose stories are tangentially related.

It's a chick flick take on "Short Cuts." At least, that's what it wants to be.

The tales don't link elegantly enough to make a meaningful whole of the melodramatic parts. The cast creates raw, soulful portrayals but the impact of the performances is diminished by structural contrivances.

The success or failure of such a fragmented film hinges on its final sequence, where the director has the opportunity to cohere all the random elements into a single statement. "Nine Lives" doesn't build to a grand finale. It staggers to a close with a frustratingly cryptic coda, the weakest scene in the lot.

The movie is written and directed by Rodrigo Garcia, who offers a new variation on his similarly uneven anthology, "Things You Can Tell Just by Looking at Her," and even enlists a few returning cast members.

Garcia does achieve a degree of cosmic truth in certain episodes, as the no-cut format facilitates honest performance. The strongest scenes, featuring Robin Wright Penn, Holly Hunter and Amy Brenneman, are emotional arias that convey years of tumult in minutes of screen time.

Each installment is pitched differently. Some build in intensity. Others wind down from crisis to quiet. They often end in enigma, missing some crucial piece of context that is revealed in one of the other episodes.

Scenes open with a title card that reads the first name of a protagonist. Garcia creates deliberately vague setups in which appearances are deceptive. Sisters behave like mother-daughter, parents are scolded by children and the youngest characters are often the wisest. Delineating the relationships demands full concentration and maybe even a second viewing.

The film's bookends are weak but there are some bravura sequences sandwiched between. Diana (Wright Penn) is a pregnant woman who sees an old flame while grocery shopping, an encounter that escalates from small talk to tearful confession. Sonia (Hunter) is stuck in a bad relationship with a spiteful boyfriend. An anxious elevator ride illustrates their go-nowhere dynamic.

Although Lorna (Brenneman) has not spoken with her ex-husband in a year and a half, mourners at the funeral for his second wife confront her as the cause of the woman's suicide. The former spouses sneak away from the service for a quick tryst, but it isn't a new beginning for them, just a sad elegy.

The ninth episode features Glenn Close and Dakota Fanning as mother and child picnicking in a cemetery. The infuriatingly precocious Fanning spots a resident graveyard cat, hence the movie's title, and discusses the futility of life with her mom. It's the sort of conversation that only occurs in arthouse movies, particularly those that don't know how to end.

But as you settle into Nine Lives, there's rarely a trite moment. There are weaker vignettes and, at times, some obvious writing, but the film's structure is so beguiling and the actresses are so stellar that their everyday existences feel simultaneously real and highly unusual—you rarely see characters and situations like these on screen. Beginning with a shriek, the first story leads the film on a worrisome path. Will it be this histrionic for the entire run through? Well, no, and the character makes sense as the film goes along. Sandra (Elpidia Carrillo) is in prison (though her jail duds read "LA County Jail," so we're not entirely sure how locked up she is). As she mops the floor, she eagerly awaits the chance to talk to her visiting daughter. When the phone doesn't work and the guards can't help her, she flips out. Screaming and kicking, her despair is palpable. And that's about all we learn—at first.

From that prison emerges another sort of prison, this time a high-end grocery store in Bel Air. In one of the film's finest sequences, the married and very pregnant Diane (Robin Wright Penn) scans the aisles, only to see her old, and most likely, true love (Jason Isaacs), a man she's not laid eyes on in five years. The mundane conversation mingling with obvious chemistry, bitter confrontation and, finally, abject sadness (we get the feeling he really hurt her) is so beautifully handled by Wright-Penn that even the sound of her shopping cart speeding and slowing down matches her staggered feelings.

There's not enough space to discuss every story, but some of the highlights include an uncomfortable visit Sonia (Holly Hunter) has with her dysfunctional and morbidly hilarious boyfriend (a terrific Stephen Dillane) while dropping by with some posh friends. There's also teenage Samantha (Amanda Seyfried), whose house seems incredibly small as she bounces between her funny, wheelchair-bound dad (a great Ian McShane), whom she adores, and sweet, advice-giving mom (Sissy Spacek—who continues in her own story later), with whom she speaks impatiently. There's also Lorna (Amy Brenneman), the ex wife of a deaf man (William Fichtner) who, perhaps foolishly, attends the funeral of his new wife. The ex is still in love with Lorna, and mourners look at her with scorn. The deceased had committed suicide, presumably, with Lorna in mind. What marks this sequence as so atypical is how it unfolds comically, at first, and then sexually. Another remarkably touching vignette involves a woman (Kathy Baker) readying for surgery, angry that one of her breasts will be removed, and taking it out on her patient husband (Joe Mantegna). How he just lets her get it out, and the longstanding bond between the two, is remarkably presented—sweet without being sappy, bitchy without being grating. Within 10 minutes, you genuinely care about these people. The movie closes, ever nicely, but with tinges of darkness as mama Maggie (Glenn Close) has a picnic at a gravesite with her charming daughter Maria (the unstoppably talented Dakota Fanning).

Energetic and truly alive, Nine Lives weaves through terrain that could have played melodramatic—the stuff of Lifetime. But thanks to Garcia's vigorous camerawork, startlingly in-depth touches, guile and, importantly, a stable of top-notch actresses, and actors, the picture remains fresh and unexpected.

The overall theme is of attachment and, in the extreme, imprisonment of women by the mandate of their emotions. The telling of the story as nine separate stories is unusual, but effective, in that it allows director/writer Garcia to concentrate on exactly what he wants for each piece of the whole, unbound by a conventional storyline that would need to combine all of the different characters. Indeed, it would be impossible to combine the twenty of so characters into anything other than another “War and Peace” and certainly not anything suitable for a feature-length film.

The vignette technique allows the tight compression of traits, behaviors and segments of femininity into the overall composite. As such the film is dense and all business, with little time for foolishness. The male characters are props, more or less, representing outside emotional and physical pluses and minus’s that affect and form women’s outlooks over time. Some are jail guards, parts of the machine. Others are detached lovers, going through the motions. One is paralyzed, one is deaf. If the film is one-sided, so be it. It is simply not about men and the male characters, while human, are little more than weather and other surroundings in which the women are placed.

The filming style is strictly steady-cam, similar to Ingmar Bergman’s recent “Saraband.” Each vignette is shot in real time, continuously, with few camera positions. Like the photography, the voices are straightforward and almost read, like Bergman’s lines. They are meant to be listened to and there is no time wasted on slang, slurs or asides. Everything is straight ahead and clearly visible. Like “Saraband” the majority of the shots are inside---inside a prison, a grocery, houses, a funeral parlor (the funniest of them all), a would-be lover’s motel and a hospital. Only in the third story does Lisa Gay Hamilton venture into the back yard of the house that was her prison and in the final episode Glenn Close passes the baton to Dakota Fanning during a picnic in a cemetery. Do cats really have nine lives? No, only one. There is little background music until he end of the film. The accent is on the words and the acting.

The viewer creates the before, and the after, for each story. This requires a lot of work on the part of the audience in order to connect the dots. Many of the stories involve weighty emotional baggage, some from the distant past, and the viewer has to understand that and assimilate it into the story at hand in real time. That is, the past has to be pieced together while the p[resent is being told. This exercise, though ultimately successful, will be too much for some viewers and they will lose a couple of the stories as a result.

Nine Lives opens strong on Sandra (Elpidia Carrillo), an imprisoned mother. Mopping up a floor, she’s threatened by fellow prisoners, and harassed by a guard (Miguel Sandoval) who’s convinced she can give him information. Everyone tells Sandra she’s not going to make it, but you think she just might be able to, hunkering down turtle-like and just plowing through the rest of her sentence. But then her daughter visits, and the phone doesn’t work, sending Sandra into a stunning explosion of rage, like a mother bear kept from her cub. It’s a short, unrelentingly powerful story, and done by itself it would stand as a sublime little tragedy. The same goes for the final piece, in which Glenn Close and Dakota Fanning (hardly a better match could be imagined) visit a cemetery and talk with sublime ease about not much at all. But then comes the rest of the film in between.

In short order we’re given Robin Penn Wright as another mother, this one expecting, who runs into an old lover at a supermarket, Amy Brenneman playing a carefree woman at the funeral of the wife of her ex-husband, Holly Hunter getting upset with her boyfriend for telling too-personal stories to their uncomfortable guests, and so on. Even when the writing moves beyond bourgeois pathos – as is the case with a painfully overacted story where a manic Lisa Gay Hamilton confronts her father for some traumatizing transgression from the past – Garcia is rarely able to get inside his character’s heads in the span of time he’s allowed them, and the ways in which he’ll shoehorn an actor from one piece into another never adds anything and seems to be just showing off.

Maggie has spread out a picnic blanket in front of a modest tombstone that marks the grave of her husband or a close relative (the inscription is never shown nor is a name mentioned). Later, she stands guard behind a tree while her daughter urinates. At another point, she remarks at how amazing it is that people make it through life carrying so much heavy baggage.

This is how the moments unfold in the movie and in life, like the shadows of clouds skittering across the lawn. While Maggie converses with her daughter, there is a split second in which her grief suddenly wells up, but she catches herself and swallows it. And in one slow, breathtaking shot, the camera pans 360 degrees to observe the trees and grass and to drink in the quiet of an eternal resting ground.

Although the vignette is set in a cemetery, it doesn't offer the sort of weepy closure that people go to the movies expecting to find. Nor do any of the film's eight other vignettes end in snug little epiphanies. Together, however, they add up to a film that may be the closest movies have come to the cinematic equivalent of a collection of Chekhov short stories. The film's reward for intense concentration is a feeling of deep empathy and connection. For once, you don't harbor the uneasy suspicion of having been emotionally manipulated. Given our immersion in the ways of Hollywood, the absence of that feeling may frustrate some moviegoers accustomed to getting the message in a neatly tied package.

In each vignette, filmed in one continuous Steadicam shot, a 10-to-14-minute slice of a different woman's life passes before your eyes in real time. The nuances of body language and details in the setting tell as much about the people in these stories as what is actually said.

Working with many of the actors who have appeared in his earlier mosaics, "Things You Can Tell Just by Looking at Her" (five vignettes) and "Ten Tiny Love Stories" (10 monologues), Mr. García has made a film that could be described as radically realistic. "Nine Lives" is a quantum leap better than its forerunners. In its subtle, understated performances, the actors vanish into characters who behave like ordinary people observed through one-way glass.

The movie begins in prison where an inmate, Sandra (Elpidia Carrillo), is visited by her young daughter and has a meltdown when the telephone connecting them for their five-minute monthly conversation fails. Sandra's treatment by the guards suggests she is an unruly prisoner, and this chapter leaves you with a chill of foreboding about her future in or out of jail.

It would be stretching a metaphor to say that all nine of the stories' focal characters are in some way imprisoned, unless the concept of imprisonment is meant to imply the notion of life itself as a kind of confinement. But Mr. García, the son of the Colombian writer Gabriel García Márquez, is too discreet and subtle a storyteller to voice the theme in more than a murmur.

With a Chekhovian objectivity and compassion, he brings to his characters' struggles and pains an evenhanded awareness of how the ties that bind also inevitably chafe. Diana (Robin Wright Penn), the second story's focal character, is a married, very pregnant woman with trouble in her face who runs into an old lover (Jason Isaacs), also now married, while in a supermarket. Erotic sparks fly, and she is gripped by the familiar, scary feeling of disappearing in his presence.

Holly (Lisa Gay Hamilton), an enraged African-American woman in the third vignette, returns to her childhood home to confront her estranged stepfather over childhood wounds that may have involved sexual abuse. In the fourth story, Sonia (Holly Hunter) and her boyfriend (Stephen Dillane) have a revealing fight while visiting the elegant new apartment of their closest friends (Mr. Isaacs and Molly Parker). Samantha (Amanda Seyfried), the beautiful, bright, teenage protagonist of the fifth vignette, resists leaving her disabled father (Ian McShane) and long-suffering mother (Sissy Spacek), to attend an elite Eastern college, for to leave would mean forsaking her role as parental go-between in an undeclared war.

Ms. Spacek's character is one of several in the movie to appear in more than one vignette. In the episode "Ruth," she has a secret motel rendezvous with a Scotch-swilling boyfriend (Aidan Quinn) on the night of a full moon.

In one of the rawest vignettes, Lorna (Amy Brenneman) finds herself an uneasy guest at the funeral of her ex-husband's wife. When the widower, who is deaf and communicates mostly in sign language, drags her aside and confesses his lingering passion for her, she is forced to acknowledge her contribution to the wife's suicide.

Anyone who has ever faced surgery can identify with Camille (Kathy Baker), a woman awaiting a mastectomy, who expresses her terror of "no consciousness" while under anesthesia and her horror at being "at the mercy of others" to her patient husband (Joe Mantegna).

As "Nine Lives" winds it way from a prison to a cemetery with stops in many houses along the way, it walks a tightrope. Any glitch in a film this committed to a delicate, slightly heightened realism, risks throwing the whole thing off the track. You hold your breath waiting for that false moment to arrive, and you heave a sigh of amazement and relief when it doesn't.

In the film's most riveting segment, a married pregnant woman named Diana (Robin Wright Penn) bumps into an ex-flame, Damian (Jason Issacs), while grocery shopping. Although both people appear to have moved onto completely new lives, the memories of what they shared come rushing back in the span of just a few minutes, leaving them confused and vulnerable. Another powerful moment occurs when the unstable Holly (Lisa Gay Hamilton) returns to her stepfather's home for the first time in years to face the man whose abuse left permanent scars. Ruth (Sissy Spacek) is trapped in a loveless marriage with a disabled man and decides, with some trepidation, to find a romantic connection outside of her relationship. In the film's final chapter, a troubled mother (Glenn Close) brings her young daughter (Dakota Fanning) to a cemetery for a picnic. The reason for her despair becomes clear only as the piece closes (and "clear" might be a stretch -- it could feasibly be missed).

Acclaimed director Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu is the film's Executive Producer, and upon the movie's conclusion, I pondered why "Nine Lives" works so well for me while Inarritu's "21 Grams" comes up a bit short. The films share similarities in tone and structure, but Inarritu, for better or worse, is a flamboyant stylist. In "21 Grams" it often feels like the style interferes with the film's content, yet Garcia's technique bolsters the storytelling. There's great immediacy to this film -- thanks in large part to Garcia's single take approach -- that makes even the relatively less urgent moments impact strongly.

Garcia has assembled an outstanding cast, who all shine. Robin Wright Penn and Jason Isaacs share a scintillating chemistry, and lesser-known actresses Lisa Gay Hamilton and Elpida Carrillo capably hold their own with such notables as Holly Hunter, Glenn Close and Sissy Spacek. And apparently Dakota Fanning, even at her tender age, understands the importance of getting that important indie film credibility.

"Nine Lives" may explore dark moments in the lives of its characters, but it's hardly a downer and, most importantly, doesn't wallow in its own self-seriousness. The film is not only about the frailty of human beings, but also their strengths; the hardships that make relationships so much work, and also the joys, which make them so fulfilling. Basically, it's a very accurate representation of many people's realities, neither sugarcoated nor excessively bleak.

Writer-director Rodrigo García (Things You Can Tell Just by Looking at Her) trained as a cameraman, and his decision to present each segment in a single take enhances the be-here-now immediacy of every scene: Although each character holds the spotlight only briefly, she arrives as if with a life already in progress, and it's easy to believe that she'll keep busy even after the credits roll.

What could have been a parlor game becomes a surprisingly rich sketchbook, boosted by the work of fine actors invigorated by the opportunity to create character without hearing ''Cut!'' Glenn Close, Holly Hunter, Amy Brenneman, and Lisa Gay Hamilton join the troupe, and Sissy Spacek is especially affecting as a middle-aged woman on the verge of adultery. This movie is, by the way, not just an ovarian jungle: The equally strong male cast includes Stephen Dillane, Joe Mantegna, Ian McShane, and Aidan Quinn.

Writer and director Rodrigo Garcia, the son of the novelist Gabriel Garcia Marquez, has come up with an emotionally satisfying collection of nine different women's experiences with relationships. Their stories chart the emotional gamut, from dread to excitement to anxiety to hope — across the whole rainbow of human feeling.

Each story is staged in a continuous shot lasting between ten and fourteen minutes. To make vivid his point about the subtle ties that link people together, some of the characters who appear in one drama show up in another.

Sandra (Elpida Carrillo) has been in the L.A.Country Jail for a while. When we first meet her, she is seen mopping the floor in an effort to prove that she is exhibiting good behavior. But despite her attempt to impress the guards, her anger gets the best of her when a phone goes dead while she's talking to her daughter, who she only gets to see once a month.

Pregnant Diane (Robin Wright Penn) bumps into Damian (Jason Isaacs), an old lover of hers from ten years ago. When he confesses that he still thinks of her, she is discombobulated. Their encounter drains her energy and then arouses her feelings for him.

Holly (Lisa Gay Hamilton) is a nervous African-American woman visiting her sister with the intention of facing her stepfather, who she has refused to see for a long time. When they finally stand eye to eye, her real mission becomes clear.

Sonia (Holly Hunter) and her boyfriend Martin (Stephen Dillane) shock another couple by airing some startling details from their private lives, setting everyone on edge.

Teenager Samantha (Amanda Seyfreid) serves as a caretaker for her wheelchair ridden father (Ian McShane) and her exhausted mother Ruth (Sissy Spacek). Although both her parents want her to go to school and spread her wings, she wants to stay with them and help out around the house.

Lorna (Amy Brenneman) is attending the funeral of her ex-husband's new wife, who committed suicide. Her discomfort with the situation is compounded by the harsh things others express to her. She is even more taken back by her ex-husband's sexual yearning for her after he takes her to a private room at the funeral home.

Ruth (Sissy Spacek) meets with Henry (Aidan Quinn) at a motel for a night of love. Both are very nervous. He tries his best to be romantic, but she disconnects from him after seeing the police take away a woman in another room. When Ruth decides to go into the stranger's room, Ruth discovers more than she can handle.

Camille (Kathy Baker) is another woman who has more on her plate than she can handle. Hospitalized for breast cancer, she roils against her predicament and sorely tests the patience and love of her husband Richard (Joe Mantegna).

And in the final story, Maggie (Glenn Close) is at a family cemetery plot with her daughter Maria (Dakota Fanning) who has more questions than she can believe.

Scott Russell Sanders has wisely written: "There are no backwaters. There is only one river, and we are all in it. Wave your arms, and the ripples will eventually reach me."

The film tells nine different stories of nine different women facing different challenges in their relationships and their lives. Though, since this is a film about and written from the perspective of the uber-woman, maybe those two things are one and the same. Women, much more than men, tend to define themselves by their relationships; or at least that’s the message Nine Lives feels like it’s delivering. Each of the nine separate stories told here examines a woman in some sort of crisis. One is the brief story of a woman in prison (without any of the fun of a good women in prison movie) and her struggle to stay in contact with her daughter. There’s a look at a young woman caring for an invalid father, another takes an obligatory look at a woman with breast cancer on her way to surgery, and so on. If you’ve ever watched the Lifetime channel, you’ve got a good feel for the sorts of brief, moment in the life of stories writer/director Rodrigo Garcia is telling here.

Actually, the fact that this was written and directed by a man is a little weird. Rodrigo is no stranger to female-focused stories. After all he’s the guy behind the fantastic Angelina Jolie movie Gia. But he’s also the guy behind Body Shots, which ought to give you some idea of his normal mode of operation. Yes, he’s good at capturing things from a female perspective, but he also has a thing for gratuitous nudity and hot lesbian action. Normally, that’d be enough to make me a diehard fan, but his usual penchant for estrogen mixed with bared skin is missing in Nine Lives. He’s grown up and gone all Meredith Baxter-Birney. What a shame.

The short stories told in Nine Lives aren’t particularly impressive but some of the performances are, and that’s what sells it. There are exceptions, such as a really putrid turn by Epida Carillo as a laughably overwrought, imprisoned mother and an idiotic performance from the now sickeningly anorexic Robin Wright Penn sporting the world’s worst fake pregnant belly. But it’s offset by some really wonderful work from great talents like Glen Close, Jason Isaacs, Holly Hunter, and Joe Mantegna.

I think the real problem here is that this is a script more suited for stage than film. Much of it feels like a piece of solid community theater, and it doesn’t deserve the high-class treatment that’s been given it. A few great performances keep this series of forced vignettes from being a total throwaway, but a little dose of Rodrigo’s trademark lesbo-action might have done more to keep audiences awake. Though I guess the old girl-on-girl Rodrigo isn’t entirely gone. There is the title to consider. What has nine lives? A cat, and another word for a cat is…

The slice-of-life stories all have a woman at the center; each one a segment with the title of that woman's name. There's Sandra (Elpidia Carrillo), an L.A. County Prison inmate; Diana (Robin Wright Penn), meeting up with her old flame (Damian (Jason Isaacs) while grocery shopping; Holly (Lisa Gay Hamilton), an emotionally shattered woman returning to the cause of her lifelong grief and turmoil to confront the cause of it, her stepfather (Sydney Tamiia Poitier); Sonia (Holly Hunter), who with hubby Martin (Stephen Dillane) winds up airing the most personal details of their marriage with friends; Samantha (Amanda Seyfried), a teenager who eschews college in order to keep her parents together.

There's Lorna (Amy Brenneman), Ruth (Sissy Spacek), whom we last saw as Samantha's mother, now engaged in a motel tryst with boyfriend Henry (Aidan Quinn) and a twist; Camille (Kathy Baker), a hospital patient being prepped for a mastectomy and raging neurotically to husband Richard (Joe Mantegna) and anyone who comes into her room... until her first tanquilizer transforms her personality for a brief moment; and Maggie (Glenn Close) who, with daughter Maria (Dakota Fanning) picnics on a grave.

Garcia's vignettes are written with considerable power to move us immediately into areas of deep emotion that stems from doubts about life altering decisions, regrets, deeply embedded feelings from our past. It's obvious that the exceptional cast has come completely into this aura of seriousness and style. Despite an occasional appearance of showcase and audition, the cast's ability to become absorbed into their characters and turmoils speaks to mastery of the craft is all about.

Collectively, Garcia's compilation of relationship nostalgia leaves a deep impression that doesn't soon wear off.

The tenth story is the technique, a difficult combination of story design and staging choreography. All segments are done with no cuts, in one take by a roving camera. This is an epically challenging task of coordination between the actors and Director of Photogaphy Xavier Perez Grobet's two Steadicam operators, Dan Kneece and Henry Tirl, who took turns in their physically demanding and grueling realization of an audacious approach. The challenge has been artfully and proficiently met.

My final word about the entire piece is a collective Bravo!

Nine times three is 27, which is about the number of times I stooped my head in shame during this debacle. It takes a special kind of talent to waste a cast this diverse (the results suggest that few, if any of them, should try their hand at theater) and García has that talent in his blood. He's the son of the great novelist Gabriel García Márquez and there are moments in Nine Lives, few and far between, that might have come from early drafts of Love in the Time of Cholera. Minor signs of improvement and purpose flicker like so many Platonic shadows through the film's second and third sequences. In the former, Robin Wright Penn and Jason Isaacs play ex-lovers, now both remarried, who run into each other at a grocery store, the emotional high point coming when Isaacs impulsively kisses Penn's pregnant belly. In the latter, a distraught Lisa Gay Hamilton comes home after a long absence to confront her deadbeat stepfather (Miguel Sandoval, who's unfortunately forced to break the law of diminishing returns by revealing the film's Short Cuts/Magnolia/Crash-inspired L.A. interconnection structure) and there's an evocative passage, photographed in slight overexposure, where she regresses to a childlike state while running around the backyard.

But those warning bells go off again when one recognizes that the character's sister is played—in a stroke of pious meta-pomo obviousness—by Sidney Poitier's daughter, and by the time the scene climaxes with Hamilton fellating a gun that never goes off it's clear we're stuck on a quickly sinking ship of fools. From thereon any pleasure to be derived from Nine Lives is solely of the "how much worse can this thing get?" variety and I have to give the film credit…it really does get a whole lot worse. A scene in which creepy character actor du jour William Fichtner (playing deaf with subtitles, no less!) signs his desire to fuck ex-wife Amy Brenneman practically redefines the term "embarrassment of riches," its high/low point coming when he offers to our lady of perpetual rom-com befuddlement that "I masturbate thinking about you." (Uh…ewww!)

Sissy Spacek, meanwhile, revisits her pity-the-poor-suburbanite routine from the equally loathsome In the Bedroom: Married in one scene to a crippled Ian McShane (who provides a sublime moment of unpredictable insight when he sharpens and twirls a crossword pencil), she returns in another sneaking off for a motel screw with a broadly philosophical Aidan Quinn (one of several characters to gaze wistfully at the heavens and shamelessly state a liberal-guilt Aesop moral). Holly Hunter and Kathy Baker also pop up, respectively playing a neurotic claustrophobe and a hospital-phobic mastectomy patient as if auditioning for quickie Lifetime movies.

And just when it seems Nine Lives couldn't possibly fall further into the gaping self-righteous abyss of its own creation along comes the last scene, which features Glenn Close and Dakota Fanning enacting a Vladimir and Estrogen Godot routine in a Los Angeles graveyard. The sequence is a really mind-blowing summation of the whole unholy mess that is this movie. It begins by literalizing the title via a cat that jumps off of a gravestone, continues by having the actresses spout the most banal pseudo-feminist pontifications ("We go on," sighs a starry-eyed Close to no one in particular), and climaxes with an eye-roll inducing, out-of-left-field revelation that would shame M. Night Shyamalan to apple-cheeked embarrassment.

Nine Lives reduces human suffering and perseverance to disconnected moments out of time and then purports to be a profound reflection of "reality" because of its pretentious single-take aesthetic. "It's all happening in real time, so it must be true." Yeah, right. How quickly forgotten are the long-take lessons of Welles, Ophuls, Kubrick, and De Palma who use the camera as a tool of emotional evocation, not as a mere recording device. Indeed, García appears to have forgotten certain of his own experiences: he directed several of the best episodes of HBO's Carnivàle and there's a clear sense in that series of the director's aesthetic preparation for Nine Lives. One of my favorite televisual images ever is a García-directed single-take that unites Carnivàle's miracle man Ben Hawkins, played by Nick Stahl, with two carnies against a stark, Midwestern salt-flats backdrop. It's an overpoweringly emotional sequence that realizes the insane challenge of cinema to its practitioners (forever in pursuit of the great beast Existence) where every conceptual element falls miraculously into place—in spite of being manufactured, it feels captured, a Bazinian Holy Moment ensnared for posterity and eternal contemplation. The same cannot be said of any instant of Nine Lives.

"NINE LIVES is a moving exploration of the individual experiences of nine women as told through nine single unbroken takes. As characters from one story reappear in supporting roles in others, Rodrigo Garcia interweaves a grand tapestry of universal resonance that hinges on performances from an incredible ensemble."

That description, along with the fact that the film is being distributed by Magnolia Pictures, led me to believe the film would have the feel of the 1999 film "Magnolia." That film, also involving nine stories of nine different lives, had all of the stories come together in one wild moment. Sadly, I was in error because "Nine Lives" is quite different.

The film is presented as nine tales involving one continuous camera shot for each tale. This was the best element of the film, giving it a more realistic feeling than would be experienced with several camera takes stitched together. To accomplish this, a steadi-cam was used for the camera shots but that immediately presented the first problem. I'm not a filmmaker, and this may sound picky, but my choice for the very first camera shot presented to the audience would not be a shaky view of a prison hallway. A steadi-cam in motion hides the natural motion of the human holding it. In the opening scene, an empty hallway shifts softly back and forth. Since this shot is immediately interrupted, the use of a camera tripod would have been much better. (The shot is interrupted for the name screen in which the name of the "life" being presented is introduced, the only time a shot is interrupted for this screen.)

The story begins in the aforementioned prison where Sandra, an inmate, is working hard to, presumably, get an early release for good behavior. She provides a tip to a guard who is willing to help her. When her daughter arrives for visitation, the communication phone doesn't work. She can't wait for another visition booth because there's only five minutes left in the visitation hour. It must be really bad timing but it seems like those phones in the visitation booths always seem to break when the hour is almost over. And why did Sandra show up with just five minutes left in the hour? Her daughter travelled to see her and visitation is apparently in one month blocks. Next time, she better get their earlier.

Next is the second life which was the best of the nine presentations. Robin Wright Penn plays pregnant Diana who bumps into an old love, Damian, at the grocery store. Both have married other people but it's immediately evident that neither is over their love. This scene is a particularly good example of the one-shot camera work. I hate groceries stores since they snake around endlessly in a confusing maze. Imagine filming a continuous shot in that maze where a single mistake means you start from the beginning. Robin Wright Penn gives a terrific performance and her vacillating emotions are intensely realistic. The segment's end was also quite powerful but to avoid spoiling one of the few good moments of the film, I shall not comment further. This is the final high point in "Nine Lives."

The third life is that of Holly played by Lisa Gay Hamilton. She has returned to her childhood home to confront her stepfather. It appears that he was not a good stepfather but the exact nature of the problem is not clear. Holly acts like she's been doing drugs earlier in the day, refusing to allow a door to be closed, playing like a child in the backyard and generally acting a bit strange. Perhaps, the emotions of the situation are getting to her. Her younger sister is at home and calls her father who will return home to see Holly. When he arrives (he'll look a bit familiar), the scene almost immediately ends with a gun but without a conclusion. This decision could be for dramatic effect to point out some harsh life lesson; I found it highly irritating. It's akin to the dreaded "To Be Continued" episodes but without the continuation.

Holly Hunter plays Sonia in what is bound to be the best of the nine segments. Robin Wright Penn and Holly Hunter are two of my favorite actresses and, like Robin's earlier scene, I expected Holly's scene to be just as good. Sadly, it wasn't. Holly Hunter delivers a brief but terrific performance in her unique style that I love. The story is not quite as good. Sonia and her significant other, Martin, are mired in a relationship that is anything but healthy. They arrive to see the new apartment of their friends, a couple in which one person will be familiar. In the virtually-empty apartment, Sonia and Martin get into an argument over what private information is to be shared with their friends. And that is the scene. Again, if there's a powerful life lesson there, it missed this humble viewer.

Samantha is the subject of the fifth segment. Her scene takes place at her home with her crippled father and her motherly mother, played by Sissy Spacek. Spacek, who will play life number seven, portrays a role that seemed oddly similar to her role in "In The Bedroom," which is currently number 11 on my all-time favorites list. Samantha, a teenager presumably in high school, is called back and forth between her parents who are in different rooms of the house. Her parents want her to maximize her potential and go to a boarding school "back East." She likes it at home. Is she staying to be near her sick father? Is she the only thing keeping her parents together? Another presumably powerful life lesson that swept right by me.

I'll just say it up front: if there is something powerful in the sixth segment, I don't want to know what it is. Amy Brenneman plays Lorna who is attending the funeral of her deaf ex-husband's current wife. Ignoring the pointless elements of the segment and skipping right to the disturbing elements, Lorna ends up apparently have sex in a side room of the funeral home with her deaf ex-husband while his now-deceased wife lies just a short distance away. He sums up this predicament very succinctly: "She's dead now." Powerful? I guess. Moving? Not really. Freakishly perverted? You bet.

As promised Sissy Spacek returns to play life number seven. She's no longer playing a role reminiscent of her "In The Bedroom" role but is now about to have a cheap motel room affair. (To clarify, she is playing the same character in the film but her role in the film has gone in a new direction). A disturbance in another room at the motel apparently makes her re-think her situation. There's really not much else that went on and I won't waste time trying to discern what deep elements are supposed to have taken place.

Camille, played by Kathy Baker, is in the hospital for a mastectomy after being diagnosed with breast cancer. She's a bit on edge about the procedure and lashes out at her husband and a familiar nurse. Like the previous segment, there's not much to this one either. What I found odd is how the scene appeared to be nothing like real life. I know when one of my family members is having surgery, it doesn't play out quite like this scene. It appears that they have decided to have the surgery on the spur of the moment. Camille's husband arrives a few minutes after Camille gets into her bed as if he's been parking the car or something. Camille's 12-year-old daughter is not present but Camille thinks they should call her. Unfortunately, her husband reminds her that cell phones aren't permitted in the hospital. Of course, every hospital room I've ever seen has a phone in it. Obviously, the daughter is not in school or they couldn't call her so why isn't she there?

The final life finally arrives. Glenn Close plays Maggie and the remarkable Dakota Fanning plays Maria, Maggie's daughter. They are going to have a picnic in a cemetery, and they do. There are some not-so-cute death cliches, such as "We go on" and the like. There are a few other unimportant elements including a discussion about a cat in the cemetery and whether cats really do have nine lives. Yes, the film is titled "Nine Lives" but this interjection was wholly unnecessary and quite out of place. The segment ends with a surprising twist but the twist involves only that segment. It in no way ties all of the previous segments together as I had hoped. In fact, this final segment does not have any repeat characters or any visible connection to the prior segments.

Immediately following the twist in the ninth segment, the credits began to roll. I was puzzled by this because it didn't appear that the film was ready to end. But it did. Something was missing; something had to be missing because that couldn't possibly be the end. Where was the "grand tapestry of universal resonance" that was promised? Perhaps the lack of a satisfactory conclusion to the film is another deeply emotional and moving element...

Okay, I sound like an advertisement. How else to describe this film, though? In nine short vignettes, writer/director Rodrigo García opens nine brief windows into the lives of nine women trapped in their relationships, imprisoned by cages of their own construction. It is, in a way, a film about the difficulty—perhaps even the impossibility—of letting go.

The film's first segment takes place, appropriately enough, in a jail. Sandra (Elpidia Carrillo) is trying hard to get time off for good behavior so she can be reunited with her daughter, but the need to see her on visiting day triggers her temper and sabotages her efforts. Another filmmaker might have closed with this segment instead of opening with it, thus building to the metaphor of the prison. This would have been a far less subtle artistic choice. Placing this segment at the start, when you still don't know what the film is about, makes the metaphor less obvious.

The second segment is a virtuoso work of cinematography. One of the conceits of the film is that each segment consist of a single continuous Steadicam shot. No cuts. In this segment, the very pregnant Diana (Robin Wright Penn, who is too skinny for the pillow she's wearing), bumps into old flame Damian (Jason Isaacs) in a grocery story. Though both are now married to other people, they are within the space of a few minutes helplessly regressing to old emotions, and their unresolved issues re-emerge. How director of photography Xavier Pérez Grobet manages to choreograph their awkward dance through the store, with all its twists and turns, and capturing every significant glance from three aisles away, is an amazing artistic achievement.

In the disturbing third segment, Holly (Lisa Gay Hamilton) returns to her childhood home to confront her stepfather (Miguel Sandoval) about the pain he caused her, and finds her much younger sister (Sydney Tamiia Poitier) there instead. It's taken a long time for Holly to work up the courage for this, and her resolve may be shaky. “If every memory was a bad one, how great that would be,” she exclaims in despair. The segment stops just short of its resolution, which could be a violent one. Nine Lives isn't about closure though. It's about how some things are never fully resolved, even when they appear to be.

Segment four finds Sonia (Holly Hunter) and Martin (Stephen Dillane) playing a call on Damian and his wife Lisa (Molly Parker). Sonia and Martin resent the other couple's money and seeming happiness and end up airing their dirty laundry in front of them. In segment five, teenaged Samantha (Amanda Seyfried) is giving up on her own future to care for her disabled father, and doesn't seem to mind. The glue of the household, she ping-pongs back and forth between parents whose relationship with one another has withered away.

The fairly twisted sixth segment follows Lorna (Amy Brenneman) as she ill-advisedly attends the funeral of her ex-boyfriend's wife, and finds herself pulled back into his orbit. In the seventh, Samantha's mother Ruth (Sissy Spacek) attempts a motel-room rendezvous with Henry (Aidan Quinn). The eighth segment portrays Camille (Kathy Baker), a woman facing a mastectomy who is frustrated by her body's deterioration, and the efforts of her husband Richard (Joe Mantegna) to comfort her. Finally the haunting ninth segment, which depicts Maggie (Glenn Close) and her daughter Maria (Dakota Fanning) having a picnic in a cemetery, provides an ending that lingers long after the film is over.

As an anthology film, this might at first be taken in the vein of Jim Jarmusch's Coffee and Cigarettes, but there's far more depth to the stories being told here, and the performances are stronger, making the women and their situations seem real. Despite the brevity of the segments, it's hard not to get caught up in the lives of these women thanks to these performances.

Garcia's camera acts as a fly-on-the-wall looking into the lives of these people, and though the impressive camerawork makes sense based on Garcia's background as a cinematographer, he never allows the camerawork to overpower the performances. Like nine short stage plays, the initial strength of the scenes lie in the writing, and comparisons to Richard Linklater's indie work, particularly Before Sunset, would certainly be valid.

The Linklater comparisons are most evident in the second segment, in which Robin Wright Penn plays a pregnant woman who encounters an old flame in a supermarket. That paramour is played by Jason Isaacs, who proves that he can do a lot more than play the bad guy. It's a great scene that beautifully portrays the awkwardness of meeting someone from your past after you've moved on with your life, a sensual scene that shows off both actors' amazing ability to convey subdued emotions.

Though I'm unfamiliar with Lisa Gay Hamilton, she knocks one out of the park as a trouble woman confronting her abusive father, and Kathy Baker is also terrific as a temperamental woman about to undergo surgery for breast cancer and taking it out on her loving husband, played by Anthony LaPaglia. In the most enigmatic and complex sequence, Amy Brenneman goes to the funeral of her deaf ex-husband's wife, only to rekindle old feelings for him. It features an emotive performance from William Fichtner using mostly sign language to express himself, making it one of the stronger scenes. You're never exactly sure what everyone is taking about until the very end. The final scene with Glenn Close and Dakota Fanning walking through a cemetery is sublime and poetic.

Overall, the film's a bit erratic, because some scenes work better than others, and others go on for a bit too long. You can also tell which of the actresses are less experienced. Elpida Carrillo isn't a strong enough actress to make the film's opening scene of a woman in prison believable, because she takes her emotions overboard. This may have been better suited later in the movie. There doesn't seem to be very much connection between the segments except that a character from one segment might show up later in another. Sissy Spacek plays the mother of a rebellious teen, played by Amanda "Mean Girls" Seyfreid, and then shows up later in a weaker segment about a dalliance with a man in a motel room. Holly Hunter's scene in which she plays a woman visiting friends with her arrogant boyfriend is far more impressive for the technical aspects, as we follow her from outside through the building's lobby, up an elevator, and through their apartment. Throughout the film, Garcia uses music sparingly, but effectively, to give the audience room to breathe or the characters a quiet moment for introspection.

The Bottom Line:
You'll probably know immediately if this talking heads movie is right for you or not, but its slow nature is often counterbalanced by powerful emotional performances from some of the greatest living actresses. The film also has to be admired for its technical achievement in pulling off such difficult scenes in just one take, making it something that should be shown in film school and acting classes to teach the perfect way to create a scene.

No cuts, no mournful fade-outs, and no stopping is what he was thinking. In having Steadicam shots of 10-12 minutes each, all the actors involved really have to give it everything they can in skill, stamina, and understanding of their characters. Garcia and cinematographer Xavier Pérez Grobet employ harsh white light as they hold their own magnifying glass to the women whose lives are their jail cells. Sandra is the first woman, spending her days inside the L.A. County Jail, angry over the phone in the visitors’ area not working, preventing her from talking to her daughter.

The figurative prisons are all around L.A. and populated by women walking around, fretting, worrying, seething, frustrated, sad, and never completely pleased or content. Penn is affecting early on in her story with Isaacs as they talk about what they’re up to now, and delve into a painful past, throwing Penn into an unpleasant conundrum which leads to a heart-rending final moment that is as complete as Garcia makes it. These women will never fix their own lives just for our satisfaction. Their problems go beyond a running time, fictional as they are. But in human spirit, they are immensely real. Dakota Fanning has what so far is her finest role, as Maria, young daughter to Maggie (Glenn Close), discussing certain issues in life while walking around a graveyard and eventually sitting down. She is so deeply connected with Close and vice-versa, a proper final story in a wrenching journey, as they are the only two characters entirely outside. During “Ruth”, involving the mother (Spacek) to the ever-patient Samantha (Seyfried), Spacek does step outside to watch an arrest, but she under the roof of a motel and therefore not entirely outside. The hits just keep on coming as the fair Amanda Seyfried proves her filmic worth, going from the ditzy Karen Smith in “Mean Girls” to the saintly Samantha and hopefully never veering from this luminous path. It’s even more of a surprise that not only are the women well-represented, but the men of “Nine Lives” appear in the forms of such names as Ian McShane and Joe Mantegna, each as talented as the women.

Garcia is a thoughtful filmmaker not only by the group of actors he has gathered, but in remembering that there has been and will be people watching his movie. He has no ill will toward the state of minds sitting in the movie theaters and prefers to try to help people understand what he is saying. He’s clever not only in the cinematography and the women constantly within walls of some form, but also in the gradual revelation of his themes, spoken by Henry (Aidan Quinn) during “Ruth” and Camille (Kathy Baker) during her titular tale. It’s as if he knows exactly when people will be wondering just what the heck they are watching and if it’s supposed to mean something. It’s also a reward for those paying attention because as the important thematic words are spoken by Quinn and Baker, we immediately flash back to the characters beforehand and their stories become even deeper than we previously understood. Suddenly, it all comes to a head. The reward not only is in the presence of actors worth seeing every day of the year, but in the bitter look at lives trying to be lived. And as that piano-based score envelops “Nine Lives” during some of the stories, we are allowed our own emotions without being forced to think a certain way. Also, so as not to forget that we one way in private and one way to people we don’t know, Garcia reintroduces a number of the characters in other stories, taking on lives away from their emotions. For example, Holly reappears during “Camille” as a nurse at the hospital. It’s the way life is and it’s also the way Garcia triumphantly opens our minds which makes him one of a few filmmakers to admire. With the camera, he’s not afraid to try what has been abandoned. With his words, he’s cautiously eager to show life the way he sees it. It’s refreshing to watch it all unfold and worth seeing again.