'The Private Lives of Pippa Lee' Review...

Posted on October 14, 2009 - 8:24pm by michael Rebecca Miller dodges one of the pitfalls of books made into movies by directing the film version of her own novel, “The Private Lives of Pippa Lee,” earning herself the right to take unnecessary creative liberties, which she wisely avoids doing because none are needed. It’s a sprawling story about the singular life of Pippa Lee, who comes from a checkered past and is now surrounded by a charming but oddly dysfunctional family. Miller has a few acting credits from the late 80s to mid-90s but her talent is mostly as a writer and director. In 2005 she wrote The Ballad of Jack and Rose, directing an Oscar-worthy performance out of her husband, Daniel Day-Lewis (although I get the feeling that he doesn’t really know any other kind), and she also wrote the screenplay the same year for Proof, starring Gwyneth Paltrow and Anthony Hopkins. The Private Lives of Pippa Lee strikes me as her most personal work, if only because the family traumas and existential sufferings of its main character are so arresting and well-presented that it radiates an aura of personal experience.

This may, of course, have something to do with Miller’s own father, Arthur Miller, having been briefly married to Marilyn Monroe.

At any rate, Robin Wright Penn delivers a spot-on performance as Pippa Lee, a beautiful 40-ish woman in a comfortable home life with unique problems and a creeping sense of decay below the polished exterior. Pippa is highly respected among her friends and family but has a wandering nature that prevents her from ever being able to be happy in such a situation. Through a series of clever flashbacks (and an interesting but unnecessary “director’s” cameo), we learn about how her reckless past has shaped who she is now.

Miller takes an old idea of intercutting a character’s past and present experiences and injects it with new life by filling her movie with well-written and performed characters and showing us a believable life experience. Pippa’s mother, played by Maria Bello in one of her best performances, was a stepford wife kind of a woman. She was the very portrait of the charming 50s wife, never a hair on her head out of place or a spot to be found in her kitchen, but beneath the glossy exterior was lurking marital insecurities and a crippling drug addiction. Pippa’s teenage years are accompanied by a growing awareness of the realities of her mother’s problem, ultimately resulting in her discovery that her love of drugs may have transposed her love for her daughter, so Pippa leaves and embarks on the obligatory lost-teenager binge of drugs and sex.

If anything, this teen drug haze, which involves uncomfortable lesbian experiences, avalanches of pills, and shooting porn, among other things, represents one of the movie’s biggest weaknesses. Well-presented as the material is, there’s not a lot of unfamiliar territory covered, and while Pippa’s teenage relationship with the elderly Herb Lee, her future husband, is a nice break from form, it’s also the most uncomfortable situation in the whole movie. Seeing the 21-year-old Blake Lively naked in the arms of 75-year-old Alan Arkin really did nothing for me, in story or aesthetics.

But the movie has an outstanding cast who give brilliant performances across the board. Alan Arkin’s Herb Lee is one of the movie’s most fascinating characters because there are so many questionable things about him, such as his marriage to Pippa, but he routinely reveals himself to be a wonderful, if conflicted, man. Keanu Reeves takes on a role that fits him perfectly and he steals the show every time he’s on screen, which is not a bad way to follow a string of luke-warm efforts like Constantine, A Scanner Darkly, The Lake House, Street Kings, and the entertaining but misguided The Day the Earth Stood Still.

Also of note are an alternately hilarious and heart-rending performance from Winona Ryder, Mike Binder as her exasperated husband, Julianne Moore as Pippa’s lesbian aunt, Monica Bellucci in a brief but astonishing performance, and Ryan McDonald and Zoe Kazan as Pippa’s and Herb’s grown children. The movie delivers it’s social commentary about marriage and work and parenting with sometimes amazing insight (Pippa wonders if each generation of parents swing wildly back and forth, alternately getting it completely wrong in opposite directions), and Miller has a brilliant way of creating flesh-and-blood people rather than movie characters, in such things as sleepwalking and the fact that Reeve’s character Chris can’t lie.

Almost equal parts drama and a subdued, dry humor propel the movie along in the occasional lags in forward motion, but it's the characters that are the biggest joy to watch, and the movie has plenty of interesting and genuinely touching moments that will stay with you. I don’t know that any major awards will be bestowed upon the film, but there are plenty that are deserved.

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