This is a film I liked much more than the critical consensus, perhaps because of two women toward whom I’m decidedly predisposed. Rebecca Miller (Arthur’s daughter and wife of Daniel Day Lewis) caught my eye with Personal Velocity, and Robin Wright (does she still append “Penn”?) has attracted me in nearly anything she’s done. Miller’s personal quirks, as she adapts her own novel, come across to me as authenticity, and Wright never betrays her own complicated reality for easy effects. Here Robin as Pippa is married to a literary man thirty years her senior -- Alan Arkin effective in a role that obviously owes something to the writer-director’s father -- and has gone with him into a Connecticut retirement community. Unmoored, she starts to sleepwalk and also to roam in memory and flashback through various stages of her life. At the time of meeting her husband, she’s a loose-living runaway played by reasonable look-alike Blake Lively. She has grown into a controlled and dutiful wife and mother of grown children, but now is looking to re-find herself. Well-known faces turn up in peripheral roles, such as Mario Bello as Pippa’s mother in flashback, from whom she flees only to find her within herself, Keanu Reaves as the life-buffeted loser who moves in with his mother next door, and Winona Ryder as the confidante turned betrayer. Though the comedy sometimes turns cartoonish, literally, and the drama too pat, this is a fairly serious portrait of a woman coming apart at the seams, so something new can emerge from the cocoon she’s in. The story has been told before, but this comes with a literary and thespian pedigree that gives it unexpected weight. (2009, MC-49.)
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