The Private Lives of Pippa Lee ***

What Comes Next

You may come to this movie looking for a lot of meaning and given that, the ending might disappoint you. But don’t be disappointed because what you are getting instead is a whole lot of truth.  While Pippa Lee (played brilliantly by Robin Wright) is described as “an enigma” in the opening scenes of the movie and is in fact a rather peculiar woman with a colorful past, in many ways she is very much like the rest of us.  She struggles to weave the threads of her life into some kind of meaningful pattern. While not a chick flick, this is a woman’s movie…and not just a woman’s movie, but an American woman’s tale. A portrait of the American deconstructed life where you wake up in your 50’s in the midst of the busy world you’ve created to protect yourself and you’re just not able to buy into your own shit anymore. Working as a metaphor for a “great awakening”, Pippa discovers that while sleeping she raids the refrigerator and drives to the convenient store to buy cigarettes where an equally troubled younger man with a tattoo of Jesus on his chest (Keanu Reeves) awaits.  Just as she starts questioning her own sanity and getting kicked out of pottery classes, she discovers her much older husband is having a hard time buying into his shit as well. We also learn a bit more about the secret guilt that binds them. While infidelity is a major plot theme, this is not a move about affairs nor is it a movie about marriage. Rather it’s about our willingness to face ourselves and what comes next in a life that is not only alarmingly unpredictable but just might not ever answer all the questions we have about ourselves. Towards the end of the movie we find Pippa embarking on a journey and declaring “…I’m just going to see what comes next”. I’m reminded of the Stephen Dobyns poem, How to Like It. It’s last stanza reads…

How is it possible to want so many things
and still want nothing? The man wants to sleep
and wants to hit his head again and again
against a wall. Why is it all so difficult?
But the dog says, Let's go make a sandwich.
Let's make the tallest sandwich anyone's ever seen.
And that's what they do and that's where the man's
wife finds him, staring into the refrigerator
as if into the place where the answers are kept
the ones telling why you get up in the morning
and how it is possible to sleep at night,
answers to what comes next and how to like it.