The Private Lives of Pippa Lee

If you fancy yourself as a kind of highbrow Heat reader who’s interested in the personal lives of literary figures then you might want to take a seat; this is titillating stuff. It’s an adaptation of her own novel by Rebecca Miller, daughter of the great American playwright Arthur Miller, and wife of Daniel Day-Lewis. It features Zoe Kazan, granddaughter of Arthur Miller’s great collaborator and sometime nemesis Elia Kazan, and tackles the lives of writers and artists living in New England. In other words, there’s a definite whiff of the autobiographical.

Robin Wright Penn plays Pippa Lee, the enigmatic ‘model of an artist’s wife’ who has allowed herself to be subsumed into the identity of her older, more successful husband. Yet Pippa wasn’t always so suburban and serene. As events in Pippa’s present bring about an identity crisis, the film flits back through her past to reveal the wild, sensual woman she once was.

With a female lead and a largely female cast, it’s inevitable that this will be feted in the Glamour glossies, ignored by everyone else and seen mostly by mums in slacks – but despite all that, The Private Lives of Pippa Lee doesn’t fit the modern, derogatory picture of the ‘chick flick’. It’s a ‘Women’s Picture’ in the respectful sense once applied to the melodramas of Douglas Sirk and the comedies of George Cukor.

Miller masterfully gives life to Pippa’s memories with a series of inventive but unobtrusive techniques including in-camera transitions between past and present, and even animation. The film’s chief pleasure, however, is watching the talented cast have a ball with Miller’s fabulous characters. Julianne Moore as Pippa’s mischievous lesbian aunt is the standout cameo, but Winona Ryder is also brilliantly funny as hopeless egomaniac Sandra, and Monica Bellucci is magnetic as a bonkers ex. Only Keanu Reeves lets the side down, once again demonstrating his God-given ability to invest even well written roles with a dead-eyed vacancy. But then he’s only on totty duty, because really this is all about Robin Wright Penn.

She’s perky with a despairing undercurrent, expressive yet restrained, while casting Gossip Girl’s Blake Lively as the younger version is a stroke of luck (or genius) because they look uncannily alike. Alan Arkin, as Pippa’s ageing husband Herb, doesn’t get a younger version because clearly no one else can do what Arkin does. So it’s a tribute to the quality of the writing that you forget to chunder when presented with the sight of Blake Lively wrapping her youthful milky body around his crepe-paper skin. The characters are so believable, it just makes sense.

It’s impossible to capture the complex whole of a person in one movie (or novel), but Miller uses this limitation to her advantage, by making the mystery of Pippa Lee’s true identity the heart of the film. “It’s disappointing when someone turns out not to be the person you thought they were,” says a neighbour when she walks in on Pippa making out with her grown-up son. But isn’t it life-affirming too?

Ellen E Jones

Anticipation:

The cast is intriguing, but the premise sounds dull.

Enjoyment:

That mouth-watering ensemble cast doesn’t disappoint.

In Retrospect:

Finally a lead role worthy of Robin Wright Penn’s talents. Let’s hope it’s the first of many.