Word: pippa
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...with the women in Miller's lauded triptych Personal Velocity - which, like this movie, she adapted from her own book - Pippa is a woman on the verge of either a breakdown or an epiphany. The private lives of the title refer to both flashbacks to her youth (in which she's played by that stunning Gossip Girl Blake Lively) and to the odd, secretive relationship she's cautiously beginning with herself...
...Before there was Pippa Lee, there was Pippa Sarkissian, adoring daughter of a Dexedrine addict named Suky (Maria Bello), who treated Pippa as a living doll and an accessory to an imagined life. "I was the only one who knew she was pretending to be in a commercial or a movie half the time," Pippa tells us in voiceover. Eventually, teenage Pippa flees her childhood home for her Aunt Trish's (Robin Weigert, Deadwood's Calamity Jane). But that's essentially her only act of strength before beginning a new phase of being passed around by people other than...
...past, Miller has relied on handheld camera work to create a sense of intimacy. Here her cinematographer, Declan Quinn, spares us the shaking, but frequently slides the camera between adjacent sets. We travel from the bed one tousled blond woman (Suky) collapsed in a bed to another (Pippa), waking in another town and another decade. It's a neat trick to suggest life as a continuum - Pippa is ruled by guilt and a need to emulate her mother's happy "commercial" existence, aiming for perfection but without the pill popping - but it also represents what's going on in Pippa...
...With themes like this, the movie could have gotten bogged down in a desire to convey profundities. But Pippa is too good-humored and lovingly wise to be pretentious. Suky is a tragic figure, but Bello is very funny. Arkin looks silly in his flashback hairpiece, but he gives Herb the nuance he needs, irascible charm all bound up in entitlement. Keanu Reeves plays Chris, the "half-baked" son of Pippa's neighbor Dot (Shirley Knight), whose lack of guile makes him unexpectedly good company for Pippa as she loses her own social graces...
...Penn has been in the public consciousness for more than 20 years (Buttercup!), but she herself has been something of an enigma. She seemed, at times, hardly to want to be an actress, letting her private life lead the way while she clutched her potential close to her chest. Pippa should be a career changer. Wright Penn's cards are finally on the table, and it looks like a full house...