The Private Lives of Pippa Lee: hollywood Movie
Genres: Drama
Director: Rebecca Miller
Screenwriter: Rebecca Miller
Release Date 25 November 2009
Cast Robin Wright Penn, Julianne Moore, Wynona Ryder, Keanu Reeves, Maria Bello, Alan Arkin, Monica Bellucci, Blake Lively
The Private Lives of Pippa Lee: Hollywood Movie Review
Rebecca Miller dodges one of the pitfalls of books made into movies by directing the film version of her own novel, "The Private Lives of Pippa Lee," earning herself the right to take unnecessary creative liberties, which she wisely avoids doing because none are needed. It’s a sprawling story about the singular life of Pippa Lee, who comes from a checkered past and is now surrounded by a charming but oddly dysfunctional family. Miller has a few acting credits from the late 80s to mid-90s but her talent is mostly as a writer and director. In 2005 she wrote The Ballad of Jack and Rose, directing an Oscar-worthy performance out of her husband, Daniel Day-Lewis (although I get the feeling that he doesn’t really know any other kind), and she also wrote the screenplay the same year for Proof, starring Gwyneth Paltrow and Anthony Hopkins. The Private Lives of Pippa Lee strikes me as her most personal work, if only because the family traumas and existential sufferings of its main character are so arresting and well-presented that it radiates an aura of personal experience.
This may, of course, have something to do with Miller’s own father, Arthur Miller, having been briefly married to Marilyn Monroe.
At any rate, Robin Wright Penn delivers a spot-on performance as Pippa Lee, a beautiful 40-ish woman in a comfortable home life with unique problems and a creeping sense of decay below the polished exterior. Pippa is highly respected among her friends and family but has a wandering nature that prevents her from ever being able to be happy in such a situation. Through a series of clever flashbacks (and an interesting but unnecessary "director’s" cameo), we learn about how her reckless past has shaped who she is now.Robin Wright Penn and Alan Arkin in The Private Lives of Pippa Lee.
Miller takes an old idea of intercutting a character’s past and present experiences and injects it with new life by filling her movie with well-written and performed characters and showing us a believable life experience. Pippa’s mother, played by Maria Bello in one of her best performances, was a stepford wife kind of a woman. She was the very portrait of the charming 50s wife, never a hair on her head out of place or a spot to be found in her kitchen, but beneath the glossy exterior was lurking marital insecurities and a crippling drug addiction. Pippa’s teenage years are accompanied by a growing awareness of the realities of her mother’s problem, ultimately resulting in her discovery that her love of drugs may have transposed her love for her daughter, so Pippa leaves and embarks on the obligatory lost-teenager binge of drugs and sex.
Blake Lively in The Private Lives of Pippa Lee.If anything, this teen drug haze, which involves uncomfortable lesbian experiences, avalanches of pills, and shooting porn, among other things, represents one of the movie’s biggest weaknesses. Well-presented as the material is, there’s not a lot of unfamiliar territory covered, and while Pippa’s teenage relationship with the elderly Herb Lee, her future husband, is a nice break from form, it’s also the most uncomfortable situation in the whole movie. Seeing the 21-year-old Blake Lively naked in the arms of 75-year-old Alan Arkin really did nothing for me, in story or aesthetics
.But the movie has an outstanding cast who give brilliant performances across the board. Alan Arkin’s Herb Lee is one of the movie’s most fascinating characters because there are so many questionable things about him, such as his marriage to Pippa, but he routinely reveals himself to be a wonderful, if conflicted, man. Keanu Reeves takes on a role that fits him perfectly and he steals the show every time he’s on screen, which is not a bad way to follow a string of luke-warm efforts like Constantine, A Scanner Darkly, The Lake House, Street Kings, and the entertaining but misguided The Day the Earth Stood Still.
Also of note are an alternately hilarious and heart-rending performance from Winona Ryder, Mike Binder as her exasperated husband, Julianne Moore as Pippa’s lesbian aunt, Monica Bellucci in a brief but astonishing performance, and Ryan McDonald and Zoe Kazan as Pippa’s and Herb’s grown children. Robin Wright Penn and Keanu Reeves in The Private Lives of Pippa Lee.The movie delivers it’s social commentary about marriage and work and parenting with sometimes amazing insight (Pippa wonders if each generation of parents swing wildly back and forth, alternately getting it completely wrong in opposite directions), and Miller has a brilliant way of creating flesh-and-blood people rather than movie characters, in such things as sleepwalking and the fact that Reeve’s character Chris can’t lie.
Almost equal parts drama and a subdued, dry humor propel the movie along in the occasional lags in forward motion, but it’s the characters that are the biggest joy to watch, and the movie has plenty of interesting and genuinely touching moments that will stay with you. I don’t know that any major awards will be bestowed upon the film, but there are plenty that are deserved.
From all outward appearances, Pippa Lee (ROBIN WRIGHT PENN) leads a charmed existence. She is the devoted wife of an accomplished publisher (ALAN ARKIN) thirty years her senior, the proud mother of... From all outward appearances, Pippa Lee (ROBIN WRIGHT PENN) leads a charmed existence. She is the devoted wife of an accomplished publisher (ALAN ARKIN) thirty years her senior, the proud mother of two grown children, and a trusted friend and confidant to all who cross her path. But as Pippa dutifully follows her husband to a new life in a staidConnecticut retirement community, her idyllic world and the persona she has built over the course of her marriage will be put to the ultimate test.
In truth, looks are deceiving, and this picture-perfect woman has seen more than her fair share of turmoil in her youth. Embarking on a bittersweet journey of self-discovery, accompanied by a new, strange and soulful acquaintance (KEANU REEVES), Pippa must now confront both her volatile past and the hidden resentment of her seemingly perfect life in order to find her true sense of self.
By turns wry, humorous, and moving, THE PRIVATE LIVES OF PIPPA LEE presents the complex portrait of the many lives behind a single name.
Golden Globe nominee Robin Wright Penn and Academy Award® winner, Alan Arkin head an all-star cast that includes Blake Lively as the young Pippa Lee, Maria Bello as her mother, Suky Sarkissian, Keanu Reeves as Pippa’s inscrutable neighbor, Chris Nadeau, Monica Bellucci as the socialite Gigi Lee, triple Academy Award® nominee Julianne Moore as the freewheeling Kat, Academy Award® nominee and Golden Globe winner Winona Ryder as Pippa’s trusted friend, Sandra Dulles, Mike Binder as novelist Sam Shapiro and rising stars Zoe Kazan and Ryan as Grace and Ben Lee, Pippa’s young adult children
.THE PRIVATE LIVES OF PIPPA LEE is adapted from writer-director Rebecca Miller’s novel of the same name. It is produced by Lemore Syvan from Elevation Filmworks, and Dede Gardner and Jeremy Kleiner from Plan B Entertainment. Executive producers are Winchester Capital, Jean-Luc De Fanti, and The Salt Company partners, Cyril Mégret, Robert Bevan and Samantha Horley. --© Screen Media
LET us now praise famous women. Rebecca Miller is the daughter of Magnum photographer Inge Morath and playwright Arthur Miller. She is married to the actor Daniel Day-Lewis. She has been a painter and an actress; she has now written and directed a movie based on her own novel but, of course, it can't be any good. Children of famous people rarely have any talent of their own, right?
Well, not exactly. Rebecca Miller confirms with her fourth feature that she's one of the more intelligent and sensitive writer-directors working in American movies. Who cares who her father is, or who she married? It's verging on insulting to even mention it, except that it may help a little to interpret this movie.
The Private Lives of Pippa Lee is so grown-up, it's scary. It's the kind of movie that is almost extinct – an intelligent, emotional drama that's confronting, surprising, elegant and still funny. It has given Robin Wright Penn one of the best roles of her career and she's not the only one. Keanu Reeves, Maria Bello, Alan Arkin and Winona Ryder all have small but memorable roles. A movie with a cast this good is rare; even rarer that all of them have something interesting to play. I don't wish to over-praise it. It's a quiet movie about a woman going a bit crazy. What plot there is happens mostly in Pippa Lee's head. It's a little static and mannered but I didn't mind. Wright Penn so dominates the film that I was content. I loved having this access to a woman's thoughts and fears.
Pippa Lee (Wright Penn) is the devoted younger wife of a New York publishing whiz. Herb Lee (Arkin), who's maybe 75, has decided to simplify his last years. When we meet them, they have just moved into a modern house by a pond in a retirement community in Connecticut. They're having a welcome dinner with their soon-to-be-a-lawyer son Ben (Ryan McDonald) and some literary friends. Sam (Mike Binder) is one of Herb's writers; his girlfriend, Sandra (Ryder), wants to be a poet.
The talk is witty and affectionate, with Herb as top dog. He tells everyone they moved so he could get things in order. When he dies, Pippa and the kids can have everything "and not give it to the government". The oily Sam praises Pippa in a gushing speech: she's a mystery, an enigma, and "the very icon of an artist's wife". Pippa looks reed-thin and slightly parched but she smiles as a gracious host. As she scorches the tops of the creme brulee, her inner voice pipes up: "To be perfectly honest, I've had enough of being an enigma. I want to be known."
Plot:
At fifty, Pippa Lee positively glows with female serenity, the devoted wife of a brilliant publisher thirty years her senior, proud mother of successful twins and a lovely and adored friend and neighbor. But, when her husband spontaneously decides that they should leave New York for a retirement home as a "pre-emptive strike against decrepitude," and has an affair with someone even younger than she is, Pippa finds her beatific persona unraveling in alarming ways. The truth is, the gracious woman of the present day has seen more than her fair share of the wild side. She has finally found love and security in a family of her own. And now, that cozy world, too, is in danger
Synopsis:
From all outward appearances, Pippa Lee leads a charmed existence. She is the devoted wife of an accomplished publisher thirty years her senior, the proud mother of two grown children, and a trusted friend and confidant to all who cross her path. But as Pippa dutifully follows her husband to a new life in a staid Connecticut retirement community, her idyllic world and the persona she has built over the course of her marriage will be put to the ultimate test. In truth, looks are deceiving, and this picture-perfect woman has seen more than her fair share of turmoil in her youth. Embarking on a bittersweet journey of self-discovery, accompanied by a new, strange and soulful acquaintance, Pippa must now confront both her volatile past and the hidden resentment of her seemingly perfect life in order to find her true sense of self
Tags:
The Private Lives of Pippa Lee, download The Private Lives of Pippa Lee, watch The Private Lives of Pippa Lee movie, The Private Lives of Pippa Lee watch movie, watch online The Private Lives of Pippa Lee, movie The Private Lives of Pippa Lee online watch,Hollywood The Private Lives of Pippa Lee film, review film The Private Lives of Pippa Lee, free download The Private Lives of Pippa Lee movie
No comments:
Post a Comment