The Private Lives of Pippa Lee
Rebecca Miller’s fourth feature is immediately recognizable as the millionth iteration of a sheltered suburban housewife who has a slight crackup and decides that she better get her ya-yas out. Devoted helpmate Pippa (Robin Wright Penn, in near permanent Stepford Wife mode), approaching 50, is married to publishing powerhouse Herb (Alan Arkin), a man 30 years her senior who becomes a surrogate daddy. Before finding papa, teenage Pippa (Blake Lively), recounted in flashback, must escape the soul-sucking vortex of mommy (Maria Bello), and is eventually rescued by Herb. Middle-aged Pippa wonders if she’s “having a very quiet nervous breakdown”: She commits sleep crimes, somnambulistically driving to the convenience store, where Chris (Keanu Reeves) works. A wayward son with the Son of God tattooed on his chest, he becomes Pippa’s personal Jesus. Though she’s to be understood as a 21st-century heroine, Pippa ends up making a retrograde, new-lease-on-life decision similar to that of Betty Draper in Mad Men‘s third-season finale. Yet this concluding entry in Miller’s diary of a mad housewife is supposed to make us root for Pippa, a woman with a new fella but no friends and no apparent job skills. A woman without much of a life at all. Pippa got her ya-yas, but where is her sisterhood?
