In Theaters: The Private Lives of Pippa Lee

Movieline Score:

Lively is adequate in the role of young Pippa, who is required to drink and drug and play dress up (again), this time in some light S&M gear for a lesbian photographer played, with butchy swagger, by Julianne Moore. It looked like fun for the costume department, but you can ring her eyes with khol and tease her hair from here to New Jersey, Lively is no debauched, 80's new wave doll, and the portrayal of Pippa's misspent youth suffers for it -- she reads about as strung out as my mom on her second margarita. More convincingly played, oddly enough, given the 50 year age gap, is Pippa's attraction to an old swell like Herb Lee, who promises her a life of security, stability, and mute, wifely attendance to his every need. All that's standing in their way is his current wife, who is played by Monica Bellucci, which means she's not going quietly.

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The film moves back and forth in time as present-tense Pippa realizes that the desires she's sublimating -- for chocolate cake, king-size Marlboros, and a life as something other than an icon -- have demanded their day in the middle of the night. Perhaps not coincidentally, working at the variety store where she often winds up in her PJ's at 3 am is the son of a neighbor, a recent divorcé named Chris (Keanu Reeves). Stuck in a community of old-timers, the two bond over their relative youth and abiding disappointment, though Pippa is in serious denial about the latter, even as it drives her out the door each night. "Go back to that little life you've puffed up for yourself," he spits at her on one of those evenings, and they are words that could sting anyone who has ever shopped at Crate and Barrel or sorted the recycling -- the problem is we don't get a real sense of why they bother Pippa Lee. For all of the time spent retracing her "wild" youth and the subordination of her own identity to her husband's, the portrait of Pippa seems unfinished not at the edges -- which are vividly populated with a cast of entertaining characters, including a funny, self-mocking performance by Winona Ryder as a bed-hopping writer and Bellucci's passionate turn as the woman scorned-- but smack dab in the middle. Wright's performance is her most relatable in memory: subtle, sad, humorous and wistful, but Miller's script seems divided against itself. Not quite successful as a cross-generational survey of the way mothers and daughters simply move back and forth in their extremes -- with Bello's erratic behavior resulting in Pippa's docility resulting in her own daughter's contemptuous self-assertion -- it is also disappointing as a journey of self-discovery.

Pippa comes of age twice over the course of the film: the first time her self-consciously misspent youth is interrupted by a man; the second time, for all of its literal and figurative awakenings, essentially amounts to the same thing. Should we be more hopeful for Pippa this time around? Shall we assume that a man can grant a woman her voice as easily as he can take it away, or raise it into that weird, high register of the timid and under-conversed? Miller, known more for her bold thematic play (the fierce bond between father and daughter, for instance, received a memorably provocative treatment in The Ballad of Jack and Rose) and penetrating portraits of female identity in flux ( Personal Velocity), seems to have lost some of her nerve in this pleasant but curiously unaffecting exercise in middle-aged reinvention. If anything it suffers, appropriately if unfortunately enough, from being too eager to please.

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