Pippa (a rare and welcome starring role for Robin Wright Penn) is a 50-yearold woman married to a highly successful publisher, Herb (Alan Arkin, in customary scene-stealing form), 30 years her senior. Happy to play second fiddle in social situations to her considerably more witty and erudite husband, Pippa has made it her life’s work to be the perfect loving wife and dinner party hostess, and the perfect mother to her son and daughter, who have now fled the family nest. But when Pippa and Herb move to a retirement complex for the super-rich, following a series of (his) heart attacks and before the onset of what he feels is his inevitable senility, it’s Pippa who starts behaving strangely… Rebecca Miller’s fourth feature is a 'reinventing' of her own novel of the same name. If her previous films (Angela, Personal Velocity, The Ballad of Jack and Rose) could be said to be characterised by a certain stylised melodrama, The Private Lives of Pippa Lee seems somehow less so, albeit not exactly naturalistic either. Pippa herself seems to not quite exist in the world, and it is perhaps the detachment from all that occurs around her – and the fact that she may very well have spent her adult life being something she’s not – that seems to prevent her peers from actually caring very much, not least her unsympathetic daughter. The several time frames within the film (Pippa as a child, with her Benzedrine-addicted mother; Pippa as aimless flower-child of the 70s) are seamlessly woven together as the big question unfolds: how on earth did Pippa Lee end up like this; when did she become this cipher, living solely for others? Miller is served exceptionally well by her to-die-for cast. Keanu Reeves is perfect as the neighbour’s son with problems of his own but whose honesty may very well be Pippa’s salvation, and Maria Bello, Zoe Kazan (as Pippa’s mother and daughter respectively), Winona Ryder and Julianne Moore are all very welcome additions to this mature and richly satisfying drama.