The Private Lives of Pippa Lee

Flashes of dark humor and steady, grounded performances make it a welcome return for Miller, making her first film since 2005's "The Ballad of Jack and Rose." more

This is way more than it seems and manages to surprise and enchant throughout. more

Miller never really fleshes out all of these colorful characters in her emotionally facile script, leaving the heavy lifting to the actors. Fortunately for The Private Lives of Pippa Lee, Wright is more than up to the challenge. more

Wright gives the title character a complexity and emotional shading often missing in this kind of ensemble comedy/drama. Pippa has the feel of a heroine in literature, rather than on the big screen. more

Rebecca Miller's fourth film is a wry, acutely observant drama. more

Unfortunately, writer-director Rebecca Miller's script tries so hard to be nervous and edgy that it ultimately succeeds only in making its viewers nervous and edgy. more

It almost works. We almost care about her. A whopper of a plot twist late in the game explains Pippa's transformation as some kind of self-flagellatory penance, but by that point it feels like an afterthought. more

Awkward in ways both intended and not, the fourth feature from author and director Rebecca Miller is an attempt at a comic change of pace for the usually earnest Miller. more

The mix is Lifetime soap–meets–Woody Allen smart-set comedy, with less humor and a genteel Connecticut setting. more

Perched uncomfortably between flat whimsy and Lifetime movie crescendos, the coming-of-middle-age comic drama The Private Lives of Pippa Lee is rough going. more

In a male-dominated industry like Hollywood, it is refreshing once in a while to watch a movie in which the main character is a woman (Robin Wright). It is additionally rewarding - a bonus, if you will -- if the director is also a woman (Rebecca Miller, who wrote the story). The result, "The Private Lives of Pippa Lee," is satisfying and remarkable. This film touches you and stays with you. The story is about Pippa Sarkissian (Wright) - who would later become Pippa Lee --, an attractive woman with a troubled past, reaching middle age, who is trying to get her life together. Her mother Suky... more

My husband picked up this DVD on a whim, thinking I might like it, and he was right! "The Private Lives of Pippa Lee" is a thoughtful, leisurely-paced drama about a woman who though anchored in a stable relationship in the present, is haunted by her turbulent past. Robin Wright Penn plays Pippa Lee, a sort of prim and proper wife to an aging yet indomitable older man, Herb (Alan Arkin). The couple have recently moved to a retirement community, though Herb, who has already suffered previous heart attacks, refuses to buckle down and lead a quiet life. Pippa who is 30 years younger than Herb,... more

Screen Media hardly ever puts any money into their BDs (as is the case here again) but Rebecca Miller put together a good story told in a less than simple way. The story follows the life (if told lineally) of a woman from birth to her rebirth as an older woman (Robin Wright). Along this journey we jump back and forth in her time line as we see the different lives she has led. Mario Bello competently played her drug addled mother, Alan Arkin her much older husband, with some interesting short roles from Monica Belucci and Winona Ryder. The criticism I have read regarding confusion and... more