An urban Australian apartment building is the alternately public and private forum for a disparate collection of humanity represented as animated clay people in Tatia Rosenthal's quirky yet unsatisfying animated drama. Geoffrey Rush is the voice of a suicidal homeless man who comes back as a winged angel to converse with an aged tenant after having offed himself in the presence of Jim (voiced by Anthony La Paglia), a widowed father to a couple of grown boys busy searching for the meaning of life in all the wrong places. Surreal elements blend with a prosaic narrative that refuses to ever come to life in a filmic sense of the word. The film is significant if only as a first co-production between Tel Aviv and Australian film companies. Intriguing as a flawed experiment in animation, "nine dollars ninety-nine" suffers from a lack of thematic continuity that leaves the audience wanting both more and less--more story and less metaphor.
Rated R. 78 mins. (C) (Two Stars)
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