The Private Lives Of Pippa Lee Review 2009
Film details…
Classification:15
Director:Rebecca Miller
Cast:Robin Wright Penn, Alan Arkin, Blake Lively, Keanu Reeves, Winona Ryder, Julianne Moore, Monica Bellucci, Maria Bello
Adapted from her own novel, Rebecca Miller's star-studded fourth feature tells the story of a woman finding herself late in life. With Robin Wright Penn, Keanu Reeves and Julianne Moore
The very industrious Rebecca Miller, daughter of the late playwright Arthur Miller and wife to Daniel Day-Lewis, wrote the novel 'The Private Lives Of Pippa Lee', adapted it into a screenplay and directed the film. What emerges from this one-woman band isn't an introspective journey into one person's worldview but rather the opposite - a soft-focus, chocolate-box fairytale.
At around 50-years-old, with two grown-up children and nearly 30 years of married life behind her, the eponymous Pippa (Robin Wright Penn) is whisked away to a retirement community by her much older husband. Beginning from this excellent premise - what happens when the silver fox you bagged as a 20-year-old hottie becomes a geriatric burden, and you're still in the prime of life? - the film embarks on an attempt to discover what lies behind Pippa's perfect exterior.
The whole thing is vaguely reminiscent of post-war domestic dramas aimed at a daytime audience of housewives - like a photo-negative of Brief Encounter , as Pippa's unswerving devotion to her husband is rewarded with abandonment. Of course, things now aren't as they were then, so in place of the more visible repressions of previous generations, subtler pressures are at play.
Pippa, a well-tended trophy wife, is as well behaved as a trained pet. Her hidden hunger, anger and need are expressed in bouts of sleepwalking and sudden outbursts, which she apologises for like the absurdly overgrown good girl she is, with hand over mouth and wide eyes.
