Nine Lives

Nine Lives is a more ambitious feature than Things You Can Tell Just by Looking at Her. Garcia's screenwriting is still quite the same--tightly written vignettes, centered around female characters--but cinematically, Nine Lives goes a step further. The movie is composed of 9 real-time steadicam shots, each about 10 minutes long. I LOVE that kind of filmmaking, but not unconditionally. Sometimes it works, and sometimes it doesn't. When a movie is all style an no substance, those long takes are excruciating, but as anyone who had to listen to me when I was writing my senior thesis knows, my favorite filmmaker, Catherine Breillat, uses just that technique to astonishing effect.

The effect of the cinematography of Nine Lives is not exactly astonishing. In fact, you probably won't even notice that each scene is in real-time, or that the camera never cuts. You might experience a strange sensation as the camera swings back and forth between characters, or glides from room to room, because, I would argue, the way we identify with characters on screen and the way we inhabit their perspectives through narrative suturing is disrupted when we never visually cut from character to character. There are no cuts. There is drifting. We do not have a chance to experience that cut and re-set our attention to the other character. Instead, our attention shifts and is sometimes confused and overwhelmed.

That's just my opinion, however. It's not standard spectator theory. There's not enough spectator theory out there, but I bet this movie would be a good one to use in an essay about spectator relations and long takes.

So, wanky film theory aside, this movie was a serious tearjerker. I thought the acting was phenomenal. The cast includes some of my personal favorites, including Canadian actress Molly Parker, whom none of you know starred in a seriously odd movie, Kissed, about a necrophiliac. The movie also features veteran greats like Robin Wright Penn (Ebert and I agree that she was the most phenomenal thing in the movie), Sissy Spacek, Glenn Close (who seems like she's been the same age for the past 20 years...creepy), and Holly Hunter. Two actresses who might not stand out, but should, are Elpidia Carrillo and Amanda Seyfried. I think Carrillo is a much better actress than she probably gets credit for, and I remember her from high school Spanish class, when our teacher didn't feel like teaching and would let us watch La Familia over and over again. What an awesome movie that is. Seyfried, on the other hand, is someone I'm sure you'll recognize as the most vapid Plastic from Mean Girls and as Sophie from one of the most abominable movies of all time, Mamma Mia. I assumed Seyfried would be pathetic, but I guess I underestimated Garcia's talent as a director. Seyfried was surprisingly receptive and fluid, allowing me to see what her character might be experiencing, even though I doubt Seyfried had any idea herself. That was impressive.

I would highly recommend Nine Lives, and even though The Passengers, Garcia's latest flick, got bad reviews, I still think he's a director to follow.