About the Story
The film chronicles the life of a woman named Pippa Lee, with flashbacks to her tumultuous past. Pippa Sarkissian was the youngest child and only girl in her large christian family. Her mother Suky (Maria Bello) was a neurotic mother with an obsessive fixation on her daughter’s looks.
By her teen years, Pippa discovers that her mother takes amphetamines in order to self-medicate her vast mood swings. She has a confrontation with her mother by taking drugs that results in Pippa leaving home and moving in with her aunt and roommate, who are in a lesbian relatioinship. After a time, the aunt discovers Pippa participating in erotic photo sessions with the roommate and her friends and banished from that apartment and goes on to live a bohemian life of drugs and working as an exotic dancer.
On a weekend jaunt with like-minded friends, she meets a charismatic publisher named Herb Lee who is 30 years older than she is and a romance develops between the young woman and the older man. The couple marry, have two children and later move into a retirement home in Connecticut. Through her marriage, Pippa has become the “perfect wife”: loving, supportive, everything to everyone and no one to herself.
The couple grow apart; Herb has an affair with one of Pippa’s friends and middle-aged Pippa has encounters with a younger man named Chris. After Herb dies from a heart attack, Pippa finally breaks with her life of subservience and refuses to set up the burial, leaving the details to her children. The film ends with Pippa driving off with Chris.
Production notes provided by Screen Media Films.
The Private Lives of Pippa Lee
Starring: Robin Wright Penn, Julianne Moore, Wynona Ryder, Keanu Reeves, Maria Bello, Alan Arkin, Monica Bellucci, Blake Lively
Directed by: Rebecca Miller
Screenplay by: Rebecca Miller
Release: November 27, 2009
MPAA Rating: R for sexual content, brief nudity, some drug material and language.
Studio: Screen Media Films
Box Office Totals
Domestic: $294,711 (28.6%)
Foreign: $734,465 (71.4%)
Total: $1,029,176 (Worldwide)