The Private Lives of Pippa Lee, director Rebecca Miller's adaptation of her own novel, casts Robin Wright-Penn as "flexible enigma" Pippa, fortysomething wife of a much-lauded, much-married author two decades her senior (Alan Arkin), with whom she's moved to a small retirement community and settled into a routine of docile domesticity. Drifting off in her head, she begins to reassess how she got here - sparking a splurge of flashbacks - and where her future might lie; somewhere en route, she catches the eye of her 35-year-old neighbour Chris (Keanu Reeves, at his most Keanu-ish), a perennial underachiever who even the mother he's just moved back in with describes as "half-baked".
Though she positions Pippa centre stage throughout, Miller doesn't probe too deeply into the psyche of a woman who's settled for normalcy and taken to caring for an old man as an offset for the wayward instances of her youth: it's deemed enough (and funny enough) that she should be shown to be literally sleepwalking through life. What's left works as bright, chatty, eminently photogenic entertainment, with a number of better-than-average performances on its side. Arkin is given more to work with than his now stock, Oscar-certified role of cranky uncle, and makes touching (where others might well have made creepy) a run of scenes in which he has to woo a sensitive, attuned Blake Lively as the teenage Pippa. Accompanying boyfriends may have their reluctance ground down by a scene in which Lively is dolled up in pigtails by lesbian photographer Julianne Moore, and Wright-Penn - perhaps because of the excess of biographical info we're given about Pippa, perhaps because Miller allows her to smile and laugh and work out a happy ending for herself - is more present, more alive than she's been on screen at any time since The Princess Bride.
(July 2009)
The Private Lives of Pippa Lee premieres on BBC2 tonight at 12.05am.
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