Pippa Lee’s world looks nearly perfect on the surface. Lee (Robin Wright Penn, “New York, I Love You”) has been happily married to a recently retired, much older publisher (Alan Arkin, “Marley & Me”) and now they’ve moved into a suburban neighborhood in Connecticut to live out the rest of their lives in peace in "The Private Lives of Pippa Lee."

"The Private Lives of Pippa Lee"

At the Michigan
Elevation

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The film opens with a celebratory dinner. Pippa Lee, the guests all agree, is an “enigma”— and she is. Penn is remarkably good at being mysterious. She says very little in the first few scenes, but her gestures and little smiles as she clears away the plates hint at a compelling past.

As the film progresses, the sugary coating of her life dissipates. She is trapped and no longer knows who she is. Now that she has found herself in a neighborhood full of elderly citizens who die and get wheeled out by paramedics, she realizes she needs to find a new purpose in life.

Unfortunately, the more she tries to start a new life, the more her past comes back to haunt her. She starts sleepwalking and develops an uncomfortable attraction to her neighbor’s “half-baked” son Chris Nadeau (Keanu Reeves, “The Day the Earth Stood Still”).

The story is helped by the various side characters to which the audience is all-too-briefly introduced: Pippa’s speed-taking mother (Maria Bello, “The Yellow Handkerchief”) and her aunt’s lesbian lover (Julianne Moore, “I’m Not There”) who takes pornographic photos are among the most intriguing. While not always fully developed, they add an element of fantasy that allows the narrative to have its sarcastic edge.

“The Private Lives of Pippa Lee” has a dryness to it that prevents it from becoming too dramatic and can even be comical at times. The struggles of the characters are not to be taken too seriously and possess a refreshing spontaneity that makes uncovering the next element of Pippa’s story enjoyable.

Blake Lively (“Gossip Girl”) plays the younger Pippa Lee in flashbacks. Her performance is solid, but it’s difficult at times to see the connection between her character and Penn’s. Lively wanders in and out of various situations without ever really establishing who she is or how she makes the jump from being a problem child to the woman everybody adores.

Of course, this loss of identity is a common theme in suburban-based dramas. “The Private Lives of Pippa Lee” mirrors the plight of the suburban housewife laid out in Betty Friedan’s book “The Feminine Mystique.” Lee experiences boredom, emptiness and loss, but director Rebecca Miller (“The Ballad of Jack and Rose”) clearly intended the film to be more than just another tirade against the suburban prison. And she succeeded.

"Pippa Lee" doesn’t dwell on its titular character’s melodramatic past, but instead focuses on her connections with the people in her life and the way they affect her mental state. With all the changes and uncertainty that her life and those involved in it bring, there’s enough room to be pleasantly surprised.