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.