The Private Lives of Pippa Lee: Critic Reviews

A hugely overegged pudding of a film. It's an indulgent, complacent family comedy-drama.

Wright gives the title character a complexity and emotional shading often missing in this kind of ensemble comedy/drama.

In this densely populated ensemble piece, Reeves stands out as the only actor whose damaged character evokes sympathy and avoids cliche.

The movie has the busy-aimless feeling of a cocktail party rather than a rigorously constructed drama. Interesting people drift through, anecdotes are shared, attention shifts here and there, and abruptly it's time to go.

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.

Miller has created a witty satire about society and relationships that is both funny and heartbreaking, delivered by a first-rate cast.

A superb performance by Robin Wright Penn illuminates Rebecca Miller's intelligent and revealing look at the inner wild child beneath a 50-ish Connecticut matron.

Awkward in ways both intended and not.

Pippa should be a career changer. Wright Penn's cards are finally on the table, and it looks like a full house.

Pippa's crisis of guilt -- about troubled lives she couldn't fix and parts of her personality she rashly abandoned -- is ultimately swamped by Miller's own sketchy grasp of what's funny or heartbreaking or illuminating about her characters.

As a woman under the influence of everyone but herself, Pippa often feels lost when she's on her own - a blank slate with no one holding a chalk - Robin Wright Penn allows us to get to know a character who still doesn't really know herself.

There's a deliberate quality to the storytelling that makes the movie drag in many scenes; and yet, numerous characters flit by that we don't have time to really meet.

... for once in a [Rebecca] Miller film, the chuckles are generally intentional ...

Penn is such an intelligent performer that it's easy for us to believe everyone else in the film sees a different side -- a different life -- of the enigmatic Pippa Lee -- and that there are still many other sides to this fascinating character...

Robin Wright Penn gives an award-caliber performance in the title role of a woman trying to find her place in the scheme of things after moving with her older husband to a retirement village in suburban Connecticut.

All the midnight bulimic binges, suicide attempts, sleepwalking, marital chicanery, and little pills don't mean a thing compared to the thrill of being a middle-aged woman sneaking through the bedroom window like a teenager in heat.

Just as The Twilight Saga: New Moon taps into to the sexual yearnings and psychic disturbances of pubescent girls, so does The Private Lives of Pippa Lee for the perimenopausal crowd.

The movie holds your interest with a series of loosely connected episodes, but leaves you in a frozen and distant state.

The results are honorable but not terribly interesting.

Provides a nice role for Robin Wright Penn, but it's a film in search of a tone.

Perhaps "The Private Lives of Pippa Lee" might have been a stronger film had it focused on a single private life instead of a cornucopia of them.

By turns antic, frantic, and dull, Pippa Lee is unconvincing -- emotionally, dramatically, filmically.

Penn is the best thing about the movie.