CINEMA: The Private Lives of Pippa Lee

Poor old Pippa (Robin Wright Penn) is having something of a mid-life crisis. Once a loving daughter (played by Blake Lively) driven from home by her pill popping and manipulative mother (Maria Bello), the young Pippa proceeded to drift through life hanging out with musicians and artists.

However, meeting and marrying the much older Herb (Alan Arkin) made Pippa settle down into family life. Now Herb’s retired and they’ve moved to the country, but Pippa is no longer content. For a start Herb’s heart is playing up, his best mate Sam (Mike Binder) is clearly in love with Pippa while hanging out with the just as clearly bonkers Sandra (Winona Ryder), and Pippa herself has started to sleepwalk. It’s when she awakens to find herself standing in the convenience store in her nightie, and has to be driven home by the clerk Chris (Keanu Reeves), that she realises her life is unravelling. While she desperately tries to hold things together she knows in her heart she must confront her past if she is going to sort things out in the present.

With a magnificent central performance from Wright Penn, the movie is a wonderfully wry, slightly skewed look at the way life continually throws curveballs at us all. Her Pippa is a complex, multi-layered woman who is used to sorting out everybody else’s lives, so when her own falls apart she is appalled and baffled and rather scared, and Wright Penn manages to convey all this with just a tight smile.

Director Rebecca Miller handles the large ensemble cast with aplomb, making them all rounded characters in their own right. Ryder and Reeves give their best performances in years, Bello is a monster as the mother and yet also pitiable, while cameos from Julianne Moore and Monica Bellucci make this a movie with the strongest parts for females in years.

It’s dark but in places laugh out loud funny and by rights should earn Wright Penn an Oscar nod.

Dee Pilgrim

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