Artists of the Humane

Nine Lives Directed by Rodrigo García Separate Lies Directed by Julian Fellowes Land of Plenty Directed by Wim Wenders At just the point when the acting profession seems most loathsome-as Philip Seymour Hoffman and Charlize Theron warp the screen with anti-pathetic or narcissistic somersaults-Nine Lives restores the idea of actors as artists of the humane. Nine Lives has the kind of bravura acting I don't mind (because each role is credible) and yet it's also a success for writer-director Rodrigo García, who proves he, too, is an artist of the humane.

García tells the life stories of nine women by showing extraordinary empathy. Yet, there's not a pseudo-feminist standard bearer among them. It's enough that García's observation of each woman's crisis has sharp drama and sensitive humor. (The filmmaker is neither henpecked nor booty-begging.) García previously tested this concept in his 2002 Ten Tiny Love Stories, a series of female monologues, effectively working monotony and self-pity out of his system. Every segment here is conceived to present a variety of social experiences-including interactions with men, children and other women-and each scene is shaped to transmit the protagonist's individual emotional tumult as powerfully as if it were your own.

I hesitate in calling this a short-story movie because it has the cumulative effect of a deliberate but ingeniously paced epic. Although set in Southern California, Nine Lives doesn't go in for the small-world connectivity gimmick of Crash; the few coincidental relationships simply confirm that life is broad and propulsive. There's dignity in García keeping the discretion of each woman's life without pressing for "significance." (A woman at her wit's end passes a dismissive remark about another woman we've previously seen at wit's end.) This way their personal dramas gain more weight, poignancy and existential terror.

The sense of novel-like wholeness suggests that of all the filmmakers influenced by Robert Altman's 1993 Short Cuts, García seems to have learned the best lessons. The Olympian consciousness that Nine Lives demands of its viewers delivers on Short Cuts' political insight. García finds common ground-not irony-in the desperation of a rich white woman and the desperation of a poor Latino woman. And this commonality encourages our capacity to respond to what is human in people whose personalities and circumstances are very, very different.

Consider that Crash, despite the media hoopla, was in fact a reiteration of class distance (which reared its head again with the "shock" over Hurricane Katrina). Most movies are designed to leave us contented with images of middle-class life as all-American; that's why mainstream media perpetually promotes the cultural impact of shallow films like Pulp Fiction and Titanic while Short Cuts has, subconsciously, become the single most influential film of the past decade or so. Short Cuts focused a terrifying view of our disparateness, yet it was an awe-inspiring and elating art experience largely because Altman based it on the autonomy of his actors-most of whom were never again so clear and affecting, believable and memorable.

Nine Lives has comparable subtlety, credibility and brilliance in acting. Some sequences start out like feats-hurdles you dare the performers to clear-and then they do. Watch Lisa Gay Hamilton confessing an inconceivable pain to her sister; she starts hysterical yet shifts into several levels of uneasy calm. Elpidia Carillo demonstrates how an inmate behaves so as to negotiate her safety and pride- until her instincts flare-up, righteously. Holly Hunter makes an insecure wife's fragility convey both weakness and anger. Space prevents naming every performer, but they all pinpoint a private dilemma and García connects it to a vision of the world. (Sissy Spacek's cautious lover points out, "That's the same moon Jesus and Buddha saw. It's a reminder that we're connected to everything and everyone one in this place.")

García's primary trope uses a floating-connecting-steadicam that sometimes catches a woman at a turning point or follows her search, always in the midst of life. The most audacious movement follows Hamilton through a house, out a backdoor, over a railing, then turns her roaming into a pensive landscape. This makes superb cinema. The moving camera coheres the separate dramas (Ophüls-like), and scans space particularly well (richer than Kubrick) because García also conveys the disequilibrium of emotions in constant flux-not just technical virtuosity. An entire family drama (Spacek, Ian McShane and Amanda Seyfried) is conveyed through following a daughter's back-and-forth moment, ending with a final door-opening gesture that has startling consequences.

Nine Lives reveals various kinds of poignancy because García's great cast embodies his compassionate vision of life. Kathy Baker plays a woman who despairs "We're nothing. We're dreams and bones." Yeah, it's consciously poetic-but watch her face (and her husband's face). García justifies every lyrical syllable. ------

Genre movies are no longer subversive. Separate Lies and Land of Plenty define the way we live with nuance and credibility. Like Nine Lives, these films break the narrative mold. Separate Lies probes morality. Land of Plenty heals political confusion. They are the three best movies in town.

Proving that Gosford Park was no fluke, screenwriter Julian Fellowes makes his directing debut with Separate Lies, a dissection of the British upperclass that has real insight into the vagaries of love and class. If Fellowes had Altman's revelatory visual style this film might have aced Gosford Park for the way Fellowes now scrutinizes modern day ethics and self-justification. Tom Wilkinson plays an all-too-human lawyer whose wife (wily and womanly Emily Watson) dallies with a playboy (Rupert Everett, at his louche best). Routine stuff, that is, until the playboy seduces them all into covering up a homicide. Not only is fidelity at stake but privilege and the real hurtful meaning of love. Fellowes evokes Joseph Losey-Harold Pinter's memorably sinister 1967 Accident, but these modern day tensions comment on Tony Blair-era crises. This triangle, damned yet punctilious, is caught between Iraq and a hard place. See it.

Wim Wenders' Land of Plenty is named after a superb Leonard Cohen tune. ("For what's left of our religion/ I lift my voice to pray/ May the lights in the land of plenty/ Shine on the truth some day.") The story of a crazed, vigilant Vietnam vet (John Diehl) who is reunited with his only relative, a niece (Michelle Williams) who returns to the U.S. from Israel after 9/11, gets just about everything right about today's political and moral muddle. There are simply amazing moments such as Wenders presenting the uncle and niece's eye contact by juxtaposing one's anxious face in a car mirror with the other's beseeching visage. Wenders knows how to do spiritual noir and he makes sense of the way close relations can be torn between family and society, nation and government. An immigrant's cry, "My country is not a place, but people" resonates. Wenders even makes room for the vet to utter a defense of the war that damaged him that no thinking person can refute (and only a West German would dare). No surprise that the media has overlooked Wenders and Fellowes to celebrate George Clooney and David Cronenberg; Land of Plenty and Separate Lies challenge viewers to think and see.