Filmmaker Rodrigo Garcia with producers Julie Lynn (L) and Kelly Thomas at September's Nine Lives premiere (Photos: STV)

Let me just be honest for a second, because I think my appreciation of Rodrigo Garcia's Nine Lives boasts a little more substance when anchored in its source: I wanted to hate this movie. I had low expectations from the moment I heard about it--a movie comprising episodes from nine women's lives, all shot in unbroken takes, stitching a "grand tapestry of universal resonance," if you are the type who takes press-kit promises at face value. Which I don't.

However, where I anticipated some gimmicky, estrogen-drunk ramble through indie melodrama, I was surprised to find a surprising, thoughtful, exceedingly well-acted piece of work. I probably miscalculated to expect much less from a cast that includes Holly Hunter, Sissy Spacek, Glenn Close, Amy Brenneman and others alongside penis-packing counterparts like Aidan Quinn, Joe Mantegna, William Fichtner. Nevertheless, while neither Garcia nor his cast will fool anybody with some of Nine Lives' smugness and spells of irrelevancy, they offer an inviting curio that at least tries to cherish its resources. When the fluid camera, its subjects and their director strike a balance--which occurs more often than not, especially in the film's second half--the result is some genuinely striking cinema.

Moreover, even if a few of his actors accede to showiness, Garcia's style clearly rewards the most proficient in his cast. "Coming from theater, it's kind a nice because you can have an arc and you don't have to stop," Close told The Reeler during a press event during last month's Independent Film Week, when Nine Lives was feted with its premiere (the film opens Friday in New York). "I really liked it. Each segment ends in quite an emotional place, and it actually allowed all the actors to get there in real time. The daunting part was just the technical aspect and everything they pulled off: camera movement, focus pulling. That was one of the things that intrigued me about it—that challenge."

You could argue that the whole film represents "that challenge"--pulling off 12-minute takes that roam from car interiors to elevators to shrouded suburban floor plans and beyond--because Nine Lives exchanges a feature-length narrative for its extensive treatment of themes. There really is no way around it; the film's fragmentation offers probably the most prominent symbol of its characters' disconnections. "Two people can be joined at the hip in relationships that aren't quite resolved," Garcia explained to me when asked to choose his film's overriding idea. "These are daily problems with no solution. People just carry this baggage forever. Hopefully, those are the themes or the arteries that connect one story to another. This is so for almost everyone, and yet we don't think so when we're talking to a receptionist at a doctor's office, or a waiter, or a doctor, or the bank manager. Everyone has a life at least as vast as your own. And yet we don't connect to the other--we think, 'Those are the extras of my life.' "

That might sound pretentious, and Garcia actually achieves pretension when weaving some of his most troubled characters into others' stories. When the suicidal Holly (a scenery-devouring Lisa Gay Robinson) re-emerges as a compassionate cancer ward nurse attending to a stricken Camille (Kathy Baker), rationalizing "the extras of my life" is the last thing on any viewer's mind. Rather, you resent any attention deflected from Baker's stunningly bitchy suffering and its impact on her patient husband (Mantegna).

Yet other dialectics purr: Spacek's housefrau flees domesticity--haunted by her disabled husband (Ian McShane) and her beloved, ambivalent daughter (Amanda Seyfried, who also receives her own episode here)--for a motel tryst with her lover Henry (Aidan Quinn), and their sleepy, scotch-addled conversation resonates authentically enough with the tone of a secret life. Hunter's plucky Sonia joins her emotionally abusive boyfriend (Stephen Dillane, slithering like a character from a Neil LaBute film) at an ill-fated visit with their married friends, one of whom we spotted earlier trying to pick up his pregnant lost love (Robin Wright Penn) at a grocery store. I mean, of course it is contrived, but this is the movies; you will need a better excuse than that to disqualify Garcia's glimpse at irresolution out of hand—especially as his stories bound between those bit players we really would tend to overlook in a conventional narrative.

Spacek and Quinn offer near-effortless work here, as does Hunter, despite her misgivings about the "rehearse one day, shoot the next" production schedule. "I embraced it under duress," she told me in retrospect. "There is a luxury of time that you get to really, truly marinate in an idea—in a movie or a character. ... That was not included in this process." Brenneman and Fichtner share the film's finest sequence, during which a woman and her parents attend the funeral of her ex-husband's second wife. Here, Garcia gambles most fearlessly with his episodic format, and his restrained emphasis on irony and horror is just about flawless. Fichtner's deaf, desperate widower pursues Brenneman through the funeral home, risking irrevocable ignominy for little more than old times' sake. But their sexual coupling—past and present, however passionate—still retains the disconnection that plagues everybody in Nine Lives.

Glenn Close, just one of Nine Lives' mourning mamas

Garcia's script does slog through a few repellent bromides (shouldn't the film's obvious framework and Garcia's nine subjects preclude him from writing lines like, "Every woman is a universe"?), and his final episode—featuring Close visiting her late daughter's gravesite with her surviving daughter (Dakota Fanning)—saturates the screen with cuteness, metaphysics and a hailstorm of overripe metaphors. There is nothing at all believable about the first episode, either, with the convict Sandra (Elpidia Carillo) bargaining with jailhouse gossip as a means of persuading guards to let her see her visiting daughter.

And then there is the camerawork. A veteran camera operator himself, Garcia decided early on to shoot the sequences in single takes. "The original idea comes from the fact that I was writing and thinking, 'Well, if I'm not going to tell a story, but just see a few minutes of [a character's] life, why not see it in those actual few minutes?' " he said. "I thought it would be easier for the actors to let them carry it--to let an actress just hold it and run with it and get her own pace going and know what she's headed for. In that sense, I thought would just be better than shooting it piecemeal."

I know what you are thinking: "But Rodrigo, isn't 'piecemeal' shooting the heart of film? Editing, mise en scene, etc.? Are you sure this was not just a gimmick?" At least I was thinking that, and I asked him.

"Well, having taken on the challenge of shooting in one take, then ironically, you take on the challenge of making that one take invisible," he replied. "The last thing you want to do with camera or anything else is show off. You don't want to say 'Look, Ma, look what I can do.' So you say, 'OK, let's do it one take, but let's make it look like it's not in one take. And ultimately most everyone who's in the audience—most everyone who's not a filmmaker—hasn't noticed and doesn't care.' "

You must know I would tear that observation to shreds if it rang the least bit false or disingenuous (Exhibit A: Cameron Crowe). However, Garcia choreographs both camera operators Dan Kneece and Henry Tirl and his actors in a sort of exquisite, inconspicuous ballet in even the tightest spaces and situations. I think the trick is stillness: Nine Lives boasts no movement-for-the-sake-of-movement, no garish Steadicam stunts like climbing through fences or any of the self-aware garbage that fills 95 percent of that long-take-movie to end all long-take-movies, Russian Ark. Like Hitchcock's own single-take experiment Rope--another film in which character outstrips narrative (I mean, we know whodunnit in the first shot)--the film lives and dies by performance.

Mostly, and to my pleasant surprise, Nine Lives, um, lives. Thank God for defied expectations.