Holly (Lisa Gay Hamilton) can’t get her life on track, unable to move forward until her father admits the wrongs he’s done to her. Diana (Robin Wright Penn) runs into a past beau, and even though she’s now moved on the pangs of regret over where they once were threatens to overwhelm her. Ruth (Sissy Spacek) ponders an extramarital affair sitting in her car outside a seedy motel. Maggie (Glen Close) wakes up to realize she has allowed her own life to be far eclipsed by that of her grade school-age daughter Maria (Dakota Fanning).

These are four of the stories sitting inside Rodrigo Garcia’s (“Things You Can Tell Just By Looking at Her”) new drama “Nine Lives.” As the title suggests, there are nine different tales residing within the confines of the writer-director’s latest, each roughly 11 to 13 minutes in length and all shot in a single unbroken take. It is an anthology; stinging personal microcosms of feminine loss, regret, heartbreak and forgiveness featuring some of the greatest female acting talent ever to grace the screen in one picture. It is a unique, highly personal mini-melodrama epic, and like any anthology it is filled with highs, lows and moments mystifyingly stuck somewhere in-between.

Thankfully, there are far more highs than lows, Garcia hitting a couple of vignettes clean out of the ballpark. Problem is, especially in the case of the best of these, many of them deserve far more time than a measly quarter of an hour (if that), many richly layered and dramatically compelling enough to warrant their own 90-minute feature. But these are only glimpses, snapshots if you will, miniscule forays into each woman’s life examining only that very moment the camera happens to find them in when Garcia opens the door.

Some are stunning. Mexican actress Elpida Carrillo (most known for her neon blood-finding revolutionary in “Predator”), blew my mind as an inmate desperately trying to connect with a daughter she hardly knows during the latter’s brief visit to the prison. Even better is Holly hunter, traveling a smorgasbord of emotional upheaval as a secret is painfully revealed to a group of her closest friends by someone she thought knew better. I was also taken a bit aback by Close and Fanning’s adventure, reminded once again why the former is considered one of our greatest loving assets and the other a multitalented professional seasoned far beyond her exceedingly young years.

Yet, none of them can raise a finger to the magnificence that is Robing Wright Penn. Playing a very pregnant woman in the midst of an extremely happy relationship; she’s rocked when she runs into former boyfriend Damian (Jason Isaacs) during a trip to the store. In just over ten minutes, the two of them dance a tango of such emotional volatility the final seconds left me haggard and in tears. What Wright Penn does here is almost unfathomable. This is, in many ways, the performance of the entire year, and it doesn’t even last long enough to the fill the running time of a television sitcom! The actress explodes across the screen, building her performance so tenderly, so completely, that when the chinks in her armor start to show it literally started to still my breath.

As good as many of these shorts are, I can’t help but feel just a tad under-whelmed by “Nine Lives” as a whole. Some of the stories; Kathy Baker and Joe Mantegna – both fabulous actors – can’t elevate their piece above stilted inert staginess; don’t work all that well, while the thread connecting one short to the other is remarkably thin. But when a piece works, like Penn’s, Garcia’s film soars, the over-theatricality of the artifice forgotten amidst the brilliance showcased by the actors onscreen.

So while it is a mixed bag at times, “Nine Lives” still has emotional resonance far beyond most of the other dramatic motion pictures released this year. A triumph of photography and editing, Garcia, once again, shows great promise as a director of social melodrama. After three multi-story pieces, though, I can’t help but wonder what would happen if he focused his attentions on a single storyline for entire feature. Until he does, I guess I’ll have to be happy watching more movies like this one.

Film Rating: êêê  (out of 4)