9 Lives reviews: one from December--Grand Rapids Press

[Hilary the Touched]

http://www.mlive.com/entertainment/grpr ... xml&coll=6

'Nine Lives' viewer feels like voyeur
Friday, December 16, 2005
By John Douglas
The Grand Rapids Press

"Nine Lives" is an unassuming movie, modest in scope, that gives us a taste of the lives of nine women in a series of intimate vignettes.

These short segments run up to 13 minutes in duration and are recorded in real time, so the camera never blinks. It stays focused in one long, unedited take on the female subject of the story. If the segment is 10 minutes long, for example, that is how long the one shot is and how much of the life of the character is revealed in the segment.

It is wonderful to discover how much can be said about people in just one short, continuous shot such as "Nine Lives" serves up for the viewer.

In an interesting dovetail effect, some of the main characters in one segment turn up as minor characters in another. Other people, however, are completely isolated in the storytelling.

Looking in on their lives

In some ways, the structure of "Nine Lives" makes the viewer feel like a voyeur. Perhaps all movies do that to a certain degree, but the style here really accentuates it. And it is partly because many of the vignettes are very personal moments made to seem very real by the filmmaker.

An important thing this film tells its viewers is we all have important stories to share, and if presented properly, they can be very engaging.

In the first story segment, a pregnant woman (Robin Wright Penn) shopping in a supermarket runs into a lover (Jason Isaacs) she hasn't seen in 10 years. The encounter is both painful and pleasurable for the woman.

In another scene, a young woman (Amanda Seyfried) living with her invalid father (Ian McShane) and her mother (Sissy Spacek) deals with the tension she senses between her parents.

Still another: A woman (Glenn Close) and her daughter (Dakota Fanning) go to visit a gravesite and have a little picnic while they're paying their respects.

I know these stories don't sound like much when put up against big films such as "King Kong" or "The Chronicles of Narnia," but in many ways they're more engrossing to watch than whatever some monster or fairy creature is doing.

Acid test for the actors

"Nine Lives" also lets us see what kind of stuff movie actors are made of when they are forced to perform a lengthy scene without a break. The players picked for this film do very nicely, indeed.

In assessing the strength of this film, maybe you can look at it this way: With "Nine Lives," you get nine compelling stories for the price of one.