Film festivals generally have two kinds of films. There are the ones you’re dying to see and have been anticipating for months and then there are the ones you don’t know that much about, but you’re feeling adventurous and would like to learn more about.
“The Private Lives of Pippa Lee,” is very much in the latter category, a film we knew little of, but wanted to learn more about.
Starring Robin Wright Penn, who is earning rave reviews in some circles for her supposedly nuanced performance, it’s directed by Rebbecca Miller. The film, it turns out, is based on a novel she wrote. A self-adaptation as it were. We’re fans of her underrated 2005 film, “The Ballad of Jack and Rose,” that starred her husband Daniel Day-Lewis, Camilla Belle and Paul Dano, all in strong performances that were mostly overlooked. ‘Pippa Lee’ also boasts a pretty stellar supporting cast in Maria Bello, Blake Lively, Julianne Moore, Keanu Reeves, Winona Ryder, Monica Belluci and Alan Arkin.
The story centers on a selfless, enigmatic housewife Pippa Lee (Wright Penn), who has to move her withering, much older, book publishing husband (Arkin) into a suburban retirement community. This strange transition creates a period of unnerving self-reflection that leads her to a type of quiet nervous breakdown.
Pippa Lee has never really done anything for herself. Her altruistic persona has consisted of taking care of everyone else (including her kids, a terrific Zoe Kazan and bland-as-beige Ryan McDonald), rendering her as an almost personality-less ghost in her own home. No one, not her friends (couple Winona Ryder and Mike Binder), nor her family really seem to know what’s behind the mask of unwavering benevolence. Unfortunately, the cardinal filmmaking rule of show don’t tell is thrown right out the window, as we don’t learn about Pippa Lee’s personality through the progressions of the film; we’re told it point-blank in no uncertain terms. It’s the first of many infuriating and eye-rolling transgressions that needn’t have been so fucking obvious.
In watching ‘Pippa Lee,’ we also learn something else: Rebbecca Miller is a bit of her own worst enemy. Clearly a gifted writer with a unique voice, a knack for creating rich, empathetic and believable female characters, not to mention pushing great mannered performances out of actors, she also makes ill-advised creative choices. Stylistically, ‘Pippa Lee,’ is framed as a psychic breakdown that manifests itself through flashbacks, but damn if they’re not telegraphed by obnoxious, expository voice-over and viewer-aware camera moves that swoosh you into another time and place. And the sometimes melodramatic writing and story situations do take her to some hyperbolic places visually (it seems obvious that melodrama dictates you reign it in a bit to offset it).
It’s a bit maddening. ‘Pippa Lee’ is the semi-rare character film that has little forward narrative or story engine, but the characters are so damn interesting it doesn’t matter. Miller is seemingly undone by not knowing quite how to adapt her own work for the screen, with a lot of on-the-nose dialogue and far-fetched character situations that should have been dialed down (non-dealbreaker example, but example, nonetheless: does the son have to say, “OK, off back to Brooklyn,” as he heads home after a family visit. We know they’re near New York, chill).
We enter Pippa Lee’s life as she has just moved her octogenarian husband Herbert Lee to the safe, bland and slow-paced Connecticut sticks after suffering three heart attacks for stress in the publishing world. There’s a facade, smiling-face affectation to their situation. Is it marital bliss or Herb’s final resting place? And this tacit turmoil simmers underneath all their pleasantries and house guest dinners. Simultaneously, as this narrative unfolds, Lee’s interactions with her new setting and new neighbors — including Keanu Reeves as a 35-year-old divorcee whose trainwreck personal life has lead him to move in with his parents next door — awakens a seemingly dormant and monumental side of herself that has been evidently buried for years: her past.
While it’s never quite explained why Pippa begins to unravel — other than the fact that she’s in a new world — the stories begin to concurrently merge as everyday situations soon dissolve into situations with a young Pippa Sarkissian (her original surname) played by a disarmingly good Blake Lively (the real shining performance of the film) and her batshit, pill-popping crazy housewife mother (played by a strong Maria Bello). There’s an undeniable, perhaps even unhealthy bond/obsession from the daughter with her mother and as she grows older and more aware, the more she is emotionally scarred and brutalized by her mother’s reckless behavior. The young Pippa simply cannot stand by, unlike her complicit, heavily religious male-oriented family members, and watch her mother slowly kill herself.
She plans an escape route which leads her to her sympathetic, understanding aunt (Robin Weigert) and her bohemian lesbian lover (a tart and shag-haired Julianne Moore). But these sequences seem built around a “clever” sexualized photo shoot scene were Moore’s libidinous character seems to take advantage of a young Pippa. Perhaps the scene is there to further indicate how fucked-up the young Pippa Lee’s life has been, but considering how doting Miller seems to be on the ad hoc photoshoot sequences visually (fun freeze frames, etc.) its narrative function becomes questionable (is it just an excuse to doll up Lively half-naked and play around with shutter speeds?). We also learn in these flashback periods how the lost, young Pippa latches onto the much older, richer and stable Herbert and essentially steals him away from his wife (Monica Belluci, naturally in ahem, form-fitting outfits).
The story’s pendulum swings back and forth between these two worlds, with each new memory revelation seemingly taking the adult Pippa to a more fragile mental state, that includes random sleepwalking events that find her gorging on sweets, or taking late-night drives to the convenience store where Keanu’s manchild character works. She believes she’s going mad and with her husband in another place — 20-something years of marriage will easily convince one that their partner’s personal drama is just that — inches her closer and closer to Reeves character. You can probably see where this is all going.
Sure, some of these stylish conceits have a light sense of humor — a “guilt” burden-freeing scenario is rendered in an animated section where the titular Pippa Lee “finally passes on the baton of guilt,” as sports commentators note how unexpected this move is, but they don’t serve the rather painful story about the scars of familial fissures very well. While this humor is at times refreshing because it surely could have wallowed in a dour place, the line of what’s intentional and unintentional humor seems decidedly fuzzy and a few moments bordered on cringeworthy.
The truly aggravating part of “The Private Lives Of Pippa Lee,” is that the film is filled with many wonderful moments. There’s a lot of undeniable value here — Robin Wright Penn is terrific (though perhaps not as quite phenomenal as we’ve been led to believe), Blake Lively’s performance is a revelation and a heart-to-heart between Kazan and Wright Penn (the mother and daughter) is utterly devastating — but as a whole, Miller’s third directorial effort is far too uneven, erratic and scattered in tone and spirit. There’s brilliance here, mostly through subtle, nuanced performances, but Miller also possesses all the skill, intelligence and acumen to one day make a masterwork film. This one just isn’t it. [B]
*Note: we love Toronto (probably more than it knows), but man, these audiences are just happy to be here and will pretty much eat up anything you give them. No wonder filmmakers love this festival so much and are always glowing and gushing about the audiences.