Movie Review Personal Velocity

Personal Velocity (2002) 

Directed by Rebecca Miller

Written by Rebecca Miller

Starring Kyra Sedgwick, Parker Posey, Fairuza Balk 

Release Date November 27th, 2002 

Published December 25th, 2002

I have many times in the past lamented the lack of good roles for women in Hollywood. 2002 did a great deal to quiet my complaints offering a wide range of excellent female driven movies. One film with three sensational lead female performances won the Grand Jury Prize at the 2002 Sundance Film festival. It's called Personal Velocity and though I had to wait over half of a year to see it, the film was worth the wait.

Written and directed by first timer Rebecca Miller, Personal Velocity is a set of three half-hour vignettes about three diverse women whose lives we join in progress. The first story is about Delia (Kyra Sedgwick), whose voiceover explains how she grew up quickly, earning the reputation of town slut before finally settling down with one guy because he was the one who asked. Sometime into the marriage, the husband develops an affinity for rough sex that evolves into physical abuse. 

Once Delia realizes that the violence could go beyond her to her children she makes the choice to leave but has nowhere to go. In desperation she calls on a woman she knew just barely in high school whom she once saved from bullies, or at least that is how she remembers it. The woman is kind enough to let Delia and her kids live in her garage and Delia gets a job in a greasy diner. Therein, she endures the come-ons of the owner’s greasy son. The half hour segment ends with no real resolution but rather a continuing spiral that seems destined to continue as we move on to the next story.

The film’s middle segment starring Parker Posey is its strongest. Posey is Greta, a cookbook editor who has fallen into a relationship of convenience with a guy who is a fact checker for The New Yorker. The guy is exactly the guy her father, a high powered attorney who divorced Greta's mother, doesn't want her to be with. That may be exactly why she married him, though she is cheating on him. When Greta gets a break at work (she's asked to edit the book of a best selling author who requested her specifically), she must deal with success for the first time in her life as well as a challenging relationship with the author. Posey is fascinating, communicating classic slacker indifference until confronted with real emotion, which she never learned to deal with before. Something many of us children of the divorce culture can relate to.

The final story is about Paula, a formerly homeless girl who is running away from the man who pulled her off the streets. After an accident nearly took her life and instead killed a man she had just met, Paula got in her car and just began driving. For some unknown reason she has picked up a young hitchhiker and now finds herself on the road to her mother’s home. Paula hasn't seen her mother since she ran away. Her mother had been divorced and remarried to a man Paula didn't like. After contacting her boyfriend, Paula hits the road again with the hitchhiker and finds that his problems may be far worse than her own. He provides the cautionary tale that Paula and the movie needs to end with a little ray of hope.

Each of the stories is connected in a small way but the connection is insignificant when you know that the stories were culled from a collection of seven stories by Rebecca Miller. It's not surprising that the stories are well written as Miller is the daughter of Playwright Arthur Miller. Rebecca Miller has a strong familiarity with her characters which helps, given that each story only has about 30 minutes to tell its story. Miller and her amazing cast are never hampered by the runtime and the stories are likely better served without the padding it would take to make each feature length.

The film has its problems, the voiceover narration by John Ventimiglia is at times rather prosaic and Ventimiglia's voice a little too arrogant. Also, shot for a very small sum on digital video, the film has a look that’s grainy and unpolished. That might be what they were looking for but I found it distracting. Those minor problems aside, Personal Velocity is a well written and very well acted film that announces Rebecca Miller as a filmmaker to look for in the future.

Movie Review: The Private Lives of Pippa Lee

The Private Lives of Pippa Lee (2009)

Directed by Rebecca Miller 

Written by Rebecca Miller

Starring Robin Wright, Mike Binder, Alan Arkin, Winona Ryder, Zoe Kazan, Keanu Reeves, Blake Lively

Release Date: November 27th, 2009

Published November 26th, 2009 

One woman re-traces the story of her life as she worries her mind is slipping away in “The Private Lives of Pippa Lee.” Robin Wright stars as Pippa Lee, a wife and mother whose life is defined by those roles. As a very young lost soul, Pippa met and fell in love with the much older Herb Lee (Alan Arkin).When we meet Pippa Lee, she and Herb have moved into a retirement community in Connecticut. While Herb says they moved in order to protect assets from his life as a publishing magnate from taxes, both are concerned that Herb's mind has begun to slip. 

In the middle of the night someone has been wandering the house leaving a major mess. It turns out not to be Herb but Pippa who has been sleepwalking and that isn't all. She is sleep-driving and sleep-smoking, driving in the night to a local 24-hour shop to buy cigarettes. Afraid she is losing her mind, Pippa tracks back in her mind to her mother, Suky (Maria Bello), a woman addicted to amphetamines who didn't merely dote on her daughter but overwhelmed her as a living doll plaything.

Pippa's mother's addiction and massive mood swings lead to Pippa's own drug experimentation and eventually to her running off to New York to live with her lesbian aunt and her girlfriend, Kat (Julian Moore). Blake Lively plays teenage Pippa with a constantly dazed expression and sad eyes. It is teenage Pippa who meets and falls for Herb. 

Though I recount the plot to you in a somewhat linear fashion, writer-director Rebecca Miller, tells the story in a flashback style, cutting between Pippa's life in the retirement community and her life before and during the early parts of her marriage to Herb. The storytelling doesn't really jibe; the past doesn't comment on the present or really explain it. Pippa's memories are sort of random. That's not necessarily a criticism, Pippa is searching her memory for a meaning that is missing from her life and it makes sense that her search is futile.

The story deepens when Pippa meets Chris, the son of one of the other retirees. He has just ended a long relationship and now lives with his mother while working at the 24-hour shop where Pippa sleepwalks. To say what happens between Pippa and Chris would go too far, but I can tell you, it's not entirely what you might expect. That is the wonderful thing about Rebecca Miller's direction in “The Private Lives of Pippa Lee,” she and star Robin Wright Penn avoid typical choices. Penn's performance begins as off-puttingly thin. It grows to an irksome sort of oddity and then blossoms into something strangely, hypnotically fascinating.

If I had walked out half way through “The Private Lives of Pippa Lee” I would say Robin Wright was terrifically awful. However, I stuck with it and eventually I found that even the irritating qualities had an odd fascination. As I got used to Pippa's irritating qualities they began to reveal things about her and I was slowly won over. By the time Pippa makes her dramatic final decision I was totally with her and shocked by how much I was willing to join up for more of her journey.

The movie ends as if it could have gone on for another half hour and been just as intriguing. It's just the right hopeful note and if you can make it to the end, as I did you  will be surprised how satisfying yet abrupt the ending is.

“The Private Lives of Pippa Lee” is a strange and wonderful little movie with a performance by Robin Wright at its center that will divide people in hatred and glowing praise. It's a risky performance and one that will, in the long run, come to define the odd career of Ms. Wright who never quite blossomed into the leading lady so many expected her to be. Instead she is a working actress who’s made daring choices. Daring is the least of what can be said of Robin Wright's performance in “The Private Lives of Pippa Lee.”