Grow Up, Start Living

Every once in a while a movie just speaks to you and all enthused you recommend it to your friends, insisting they rush to see it. And lo! Aren’t you surprised when they aren’t as blown away as you were?

   “The Private Lives of Pippa Leeâ€� is that movie for me. The film runs the risk of being labeled a chick flick. It’s all about a woman that even her husband has tired of trying to figure out.

   So maybe there are some cliché’s, and slightly tired metaphors — but what the movie may lack in complete originality it makes up for with its cast, particularly Robin Wright Penn, Alan Arkin, Maria Bello, Blake Lively and Keanu Reeves. There is not a single actor who isn’t compelling to watch.

    But it is Wright Penn’s movie.

   Evidently the actress has not succumbed to the Hollywood terror of aging, and for that we are grateful. Pippa Lee has lived a hard life and it shows on Wright Penn’s face. There is a sense of fatigue about her.  The opening scene is a close-up of Wright Penn putting on lipstick, the furrowed brow and crow’s feet are not smoothed away by soft lighting.

   Finding herself living in a retirement community because her aged husband, played with finesse by Alan Arkin, has suffered three heart attacks, Pippa Lee meets a drifter, embodied by a smoldering Keanu Reeves, who cuts through the veneer of her monochromatic life. (Nods to the costume designer and set designer who have already signaled the blandness of her world.)

   But the story is not as predictable as the set-up sounds, even though it has a happy Hollywood ending, which for Pippa is really a new beginning.

   The message for Pippa Lee (and for every other 50-year old woman who’s been living her life through her family) is it’s never too late to grow up and start living.

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