It is so easy to imagine Pippa Lee as a protagonist in an adaptation of a hypothetical Woolf novel, a housewife navigating the eddies of the memories of her past as she drowns in the respectable present – or in her own words, is “having a very quiet nervous breakdown”. Yet this is one protagonist who we learn, isn’t even sure of the coherence of her own being – leading to the private lives of the film’s title.
There is, to be sure, a secret life that is hidden even to Pippa Lee, an entire life she leads as she sleepwalks for a third of her life. There is the private childhood of Pippa, the daughter of a very scary, drugged out mother perpetually high from speed; the short, educational summer of Pippa the teenager who stays with her lesbian aunt; the courtship and taming of wild child Pippa Lee in her Greenwich Village years; and the Pippa Lee, desperate housewife story.
Miller’s screenplay, switching from private life to private life, achieves a sense of existential uncertainty and ego-questioning that Woolf would have killed for. While the film rings emotionally true, it still manages to entertain with its strange and sudden switches in mood. Yes, there is a heavy meditation on the epistemology of the self, but that is mediated by a playful exploration of multiple genres and styles of storytelling.
The Private Lives of Pippa Lee is a coming of age story (of both a teen and a middle-aged woman!), a women in trouble drama, a suburban angst film, a quirky comedy, and a very sappy romance, all at the same time. And I think Ms Woolf would have approved.