The Private Lives of Pippa Lee(2009)- User Reviews

Early on, I was afraid this was going to be a feminist polemic with a tragic heroine, finally unappreciated and probably dead. Luckily I was way off. In the end it went somewhere different. The characters became knowable, believable, likable. Their actions made sense yet were sometimes surprising.

Addressing the challenge of playing a multi-faceted character with a complex, tumultuous and contradictory past, Robin Wright Penn gave a performance that was vivid yet not strained or hammy. She won my sympathy not via big bad things happening to her, but by her very human reactions to little slights and indginities. She allowed us to see the weight of her difficult past through the veneer of a quiet and gracious character.

Keanu Reeves created a character different than any he had before.

I especially enjoyed seeing Alan Arkin portraying Mr. Lee, a wryly intelligent guy, after years playing characters who were defined by their gruff, walled-off personalities (e.g., the father in The Slums of Beverly Hills). Playing Pippa's husband, he was still emotionally guarded, but self-aware and charming, despite an inflated sense of self.

In much of the movie, the younger version of Penn's character Pippa was played by a different actress (Blake Lively?), who wasn't a good match for Penn in looks or voice and delivered a merely serviceable performance. She often spoke in a clenched-jawed voice that reminded me of Jennifer Jason Leigh's earlier work. This actually made sense for her character though. We see in multiple flashbacks that Pippa came from an unstable home with a nonentity of a father and scary pill-popping mom (nicely played by beautiful Maria Bello in her customary journey-to-the-edge mode). I knew a girl from a disturbed family who spoke in a similar voice.

But the casting of the younger version of a character almost never really works when, as in this film, there is no great gulf of years between the ages of one incarnation and another. There is always kind of a "clunk" of discontinuity at the switchover point. That note of dissonance reverberated somewhat, due to the frequent flashbacks in this film.

I'd never heard of this film before. No critics have reviewed it. I assume it went straight to video, despite a cast that includes Penn (in a decades-spanning role that echoes the long retro view and some of the timeframe of her part as Jenny in Forrest Gump), Reeves, Julianne Moore and Blake Lively, who I think is on a current tv show. That's a shame. This was actually a much richer and more involving movie than, say, Revolutionary Road. I really liked it. There were flashes of humor and I found myself caring about the characters, understanding the people and scenes they were attracted to.

I wonder if the studio declined to release it theatrically because so much of the film rested on the shoulders of the younger Pippa. One difficulty with that is that everyone of a certain age remembers what Robin Wright looked like when she was young--the younger actress here doesn't look a bit similar. Still, audiences have forgiven worse.