The Private Lives of Pippa Lee, a film by Rebecca Miller, based on Miller's book by the same name, is a mess of a movie that seems like it wants to be more than it is. In it, Robin Wright Penn plays Pippa, a middle-aged woman who lately has begun sleepwalking around her house, into the kitchen to eat chocolate cake and also to the nearby gas station. We then see that was the daughter of a rather screwed up family, with her mother popping uppers in the 1960s; she ran away to her lesbian aunt's house where she was used as a model for sex fetish photography in her teens; she began using drugs and sex as an escape from the world. Ultimately she met and married a guy several decades older who was a calming force in her life.
The film is very choppy back and forth from the past to the present. On top of that, there are frankly so many blond actresses, it's sometimes hard to keep them straight. Aside from grown-up Pippa, Wright Penn, there is her mother, played by Maria Bello and the teenage Pippa, played by Blake Lively. They all sorta of blend together making it a big blond stew and making it hard to follow the story in the past or the present.
Wright Penn is pretty good as Pippa - though I think she is helped by a very knowing, sly voice-over narration (I still hate voice overs, but the voice here at least has some personality to it). She is convincing as a woman on the verge of a nervous breakdown, who loves her family, but struggles with the situation they find themselves. Keanu Reeves is pretty good as the screwed-up son of the neighbor who works in the gas station and becomes Pippa's lover. When he's not playing a moron or a much-too-earnest action hero, he's actually pretty good as a normal guy (as seen before in the godawful Nancy Meyers film Something's Gotta Give).
It's always strange when a director has to use one actor for a character in their teens and then another actor for a character in their twenties, but I think Miller does an especially bad job transitioning from Lively to Wright Penn. Lively plays Pippa through her teen years and into her early 20s or so, then Wright Penn becomes Pippa around 25 or so (assuming Pippa Lee is around 45 or so when the movie is taking place). This is silly and makes no sense from a developmental or a narrative point of view. If anything, the change should have happened around the time Pippa met Herb Lee (Alan Arkin) her older husband and changed her life. Also, the idea of Alan Arkin and Blake Lively being in a sexual relationship is so terrible, it really turns me off from the rest of the movie.
In the end, the story never really comes together well. I feel like this could be an interesting story about how one woman's life changed from one year to another with different men and different adventures along the way. Instead we get a rather vanilla story about a woman who did have a hard childhood (partly by her own making) and then had a nice life for the past 20 years or so. That she sleepwalks really has nothing to do with the story. After the movie was over, all I could do was wish there was more to it - more of a connection to something I knew or could understand or more of an interesting narrative. Alas, there wasn't anything more to the film.
Stars: 1.5 of 4
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Actually, I think Rebecca Miller continues to improve as a director and is getting closer to something good. (It's a shame directors can't churn out a movie a year -- or two or three like they did in the old days -- to learn their craft on the job. There's no reason to think talented directors don't need practice like everyone else.) Still, not a successful film. But Keanu Reeves really was very good.
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