Lovely and Weird: “The Private Lives of Pippa Lee”

   This movie is deliciously weird. The characters are interesting and the female presence dominates the movie. But supporting male characters are played skillfully by Alan Arkin and Keanu Reeves. If you have the tendency to be more positively biased about a movie when you like the cast, this movie has some great actors .

The character that the movie revolves on is Pippa Lee, played by Robin Wright Penn. Maria Bello, Blake Lively, Julianne Moore, Winona Ryder and Monica Belluci accompany her.

   I did mention finding the movie weird. The only odd thing in the beginning seems to be Pippa herself. She is married to a man much older than her: Herb (Alan Arkin). Herb is an accomplished editor who has had three heart attacks. Despite having two grown children together, Pippa looks like she could be Herb’s daughter. Herb’s latest whim has been to move to a retirement neighborhood where Pippa is by far the youngest wife around. She is very serene, kind and lovely. People come to her for comfort and intellectual conversation. But little by little, we are shown flashbacks that give us into her past and how she came to be how she is. Her teenage years are played by Blake Lively (Serena of Gossip Girl).

     To say that her relationship with her mother (Maria Bello) had ups and downs would be a major understatement. She has grown up with a mom who has violent mood swings where she was either extra cheerful and energetic and then awfully down, sad or just angry. What could be seen as manic depression is due to the dexedrine pills she is taking, claiming that she will get fat if she stays away from them. When she finally has enough of her mother’s addiction she moves to her aunts’ and her girlfriend (Julianne Moore) and then she is forced to go out on the real world where she goes through a wild period with drugs. She doesn’t remember much from her days until she meets her husband Herb and her world becomes more interesting and much more complicated. After all Herb is already married to an exotically beautiful younger woman (Monica Belluci). 

     The story is quite well-structured. It is a drama that doesn’t get boring and a well-paced movie that gives you something interesting even when the going gets slower. The flashbacks help construct a great contradiction as we try to figure out how the “wild child” Pippa could turn into this suave woman we meet in the beginning. But the contradictions start to face us in the present too when Pippa reveals more secrets and her current flow into depression (and sleepwalking) shows it signs and when she develops a friendship with Chris (Keanu Reeves). He is the interesting son who just was forced to move into her mothers’ retirement home. He also is as odd as the other characters and provides a much younger contradiction to Alan Arkin’s Herb.

    The movie is engaging and true to the heart. The characters seem like oddballs yet they are much more real than the characters we are usually given in most movies. You may pretty well hate this film but if you do like the actors and don’t mind an interesting drama, there is a chance you won’t be disappointed.