An often outlandish tale, the story of Pippa Lee hinges more on the past than the present and more with hysteria, then with substance. In her childhood, Pippa (Blake Lively) was raised in a household that included a drug-dependant depressed mother (Maria Bello) that eventually forced her to run away and find herself as a normal young woman. One of those discoveries leads her to her aunt’s home – a lesbian – whose lover is Julianne Moore. Shortly after, she falls into drugs herself, and meets Herb Lee (Alan Arkin) who will end up marrying her (and who always plays the dying older man in these films.) The movie is told in a sequence of flashbacks, alternating the grown Pippa (Robin Wright Penn) to the young Pippa (Lively) and while they bring up a rather serious subject about sleep-walking, it never seems to go anywhere. Literally. The biggest surprise in this movie is the underused Keanu Reeves as a emotionally removed neighbor (maybe these are the only roles he’s getting these days.) Winona Ryder adds to the mix in a very small but exaggerated character as Pippa’s desperate best friend. Daniel Day Lewis’s wife Rebecca Miller shows she’s solid on her own feet, directing the script from which she also wrote. But this is clearly Robin Wright Penn’s movie and certainly will garnish Oscar talk come time for nominations. Two and a half tiaras
