As the adult Pippa Lee, the comely, gracious, unfailingly appropriate wife of a newly retired New York publisher, Robin Wright speaks in a small, high voice that suggests a kind of atrophy. It's the kind of voice that might result from years of unuse, of sealing even the most meager opinions behind the warm but empty smile of a literary consort, and Pippa is the kind of woman who has endured countless cocktail party conversations without once being spoken to herself. In the opening scene of Rebecca Miller's The Private Lives of Pippa Lee, she disappears into that smile when one of the guests at the dinner party she is throwing to celebrate her husband Herb's (Alan Arkin) new home in a Connecticut retirement community pays her a tribute that doubles as a dismissal: "You are the very icon of an artist's wife." This now-common misuse of the term -- that is to suggest fame and/or the ultimate embodiment of a concept or state of being rather than a religious symbol or representative sign -- here seems pointed: Pippa has been frozen not into an idea but an ideal, a picture of herself.
A woman of an age growing more certain with every passing day, Pippa is more concerned with her fragile husband's mortality than her own -- a leaning, as it turns out, they share. A vague idea of rest and relaxation brought them to Connecticut, and it's a decision they both seem to regret immediately: Herb rents out an office for work and sexual extra-curriculars; Pippa begins binge eating (and driving to the store for smokes) in her sleep. When together, however, the two fuss sweetly at each other, nattering over a find at the farmer's market (a certain, lunch-enhancing cheese, Herb's approval of which seems to provide Pippa with the peak of personal fulfillment) and enacting a grouchy/cajoling song and dance around the regular taking of Herb's blood pressure. The couple's two children Ben (Ryan McDonald) and Grace (Zoe Kazan) suggest the not-unusual paradigm of a father-daughter/mother-son alliance, with Grace especially acting the pill. Home from an assignment shooting Baghdad war zones for a prominent magazine, Grace personifies the naive pomposity of a young person certain that no one has ever done anything as important as what she's doing right now. Her contempt for Pippa, expressed at a family dinner in which she barely acknowledges her mother's typically benign expressions of admiration are notable but not quite unusual; young and on fire with ambition and self-possession, Grace seems to want to defeat Pippa -- who belongs to others and always has -- with every anecdote of IED's and open fire.
With these, the film's early scenes of completely average domestic adjustment, marital imparity and child-inflicted assholery, Miller sets the stage for an exploration of the inner life of the women we've all overlooked at some point over the course of the big, boring cocktail party of life. Guided by some narration by Wright, we return to Pippa's childhood, and ostensibly the origins of her people-pleasing ways; they are rooted, unsurprisingly, in the pill-popping basket case that was her mother. "Her moods ruled my life," Wright says, and, watching just a few of them pass through the body of Maria Bello with gale force, you believe her. As a small child Pippa is groomed and trussed like a prized spaniel by her mother, praised for her obedience and composure; by the time she makes it to adolescence (and is transformed into Blake Lively), the jig is up, and Pippa runs away after voicing the ultimate betrayal: the vow to be nothing like her.
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.
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.