The Private Lives of Pippa Lee, directed by Rebecca Miller, is a well-meaning
portrait of a middle-aged woman in emotional free fall. For all the film’s
blizzard of wacky characters and oddball episodes, though, audiences will be
most struck by Robin Wright Penn’s controlled performance in the title role.
Not to mention her resemblance to Julie Christie. Different hair colour,
sure, but the same organic beauty and quizzical intelligence, as well as
that slightly faraway look that makes both women seem distracted by matters
loftier than mere acting.
So it’s disconcerting to meet the slender, 43-year-old Wright Penn and find
that she is prone to lapse into an accent so crisply English, it bodes well
for an alternative career as a Julie Christie impersonator. She is dressed
casually in three-quarter-length jeans, maroon trainers and a powder-blue
top; hoop earrings glint under her long, sunny-blonde hair. Waltzing around
an Edinburgh hotel room, opening windows and playing mum, she could be
performing a scene from McCabe & Mrs Miller. “This is good, innit?” she
chirrups. “We can ’ave a coffee togevah.”
This eccentricity isn’t the only thing that sets her apart. For one thing, she
is bluntly honest about herself. After she explains that budgetary setbacks
delayed Miller’s film for a year, I express surprise that her own
involvement didn’t help to attract financing. “Me?” she splutters. “Having
me attached doesn’t do shit.” Does she, you might reasonably wonder, kiss
her husband with that mouth? Yes, but he can handle it. He’s Sean Penn,
after all. With two divorce petitions in two years (the most recent was
withdrawn by her husband only in May), it’s not hard to see why the Penns
have been a continual source of fascination for gossip rags. Throw in their
ferociously guarded privacy, not to mention Penn’s Republican-baiting
political activism, and you have a Molotov cocktail among media/celebrity
relationships.
There are signs, however, that calm is descending on the marital home in Marin
County, near San Francisco. The night before I meet Wright Penn, her husband
announces that he is taking a year off from acting to spend time with his
family. (The couple have an 18-year-old daughter, Dylan Frances, and a
15-year-old son, Hopper Jack.) Wright Penn isn’t entirely on message when I
ask if she, too, will be pulling a sickie for the next 12 months. “Oh, no, I
need a job,” she says, striking an incredulous note once more. “I’m actively
looking for work.” There’s that frankness again. Yet ask a question that
impinges even fractionally on her domestic life and she will squash it like
a bug. Later, when I listen to the interview tape, I notice an apparently
involuntary sniff or snort whenever I mention her husband. It could be a
kind of nasal “As if” to warn me she has no intention of discussing him.
On the subject of The Private Lives of Pippa Lee, she is more forthcoming. “I
love this film,” she exclaims. It was a few years ago now that Wright Penn
signed on to Miller’s adaptation of her own Richard & Judy Book
Club-endorsed novel about the timid daughter of a speed freak who seeks
refuge in her marriage to a much older literary agent. While the project
stalled repeatedly, Wright Penn was doing her homework. “Rebecca and I had a
year in which we got to know each other,” she says. “We talked over every
nuance.” With her traumatic upbringing and disloyal husband, it would be
easy to present Pippa as a victim, but Wright Penn brings to the part a kind
of internal dignity. “Really, Pippa’s just living behind a veil. If she
lifts that veil, she might die from feeling.” The film also feels strangely
pertinent to its star. Take Pippa’s analysis of marriage as “an act of
will”, within which “love comes and goes with the breeze, minute by minute”.
Or her opening announcement: “I’ve had enough of being an enigma. I want to
be known.”
I think she, too, projects something enigmatic and elusive. “Ooh, I quite like
that,” she trills, coming over all Julie Christie again. I thought you
would, I reply. “Well, I’ve always been an elusive person. Maybe because
it’s the only way to keep yourself sacred. If you blow yourself out on too
many movies and magazine covers, you just get chewed up and spat out. Okay,
you might get to know me, but you can only come so far. The public is
conditioned to think it’s entitled to know everything about Brad and
Angelina and whoever else, but that’s not so. They’re not entitled.”
As someone who blames her early modelling career for putting her in therapy,
Wright Penn has good reason to fear overexposure. Born in Texas to parents
who divorced when she was four, she had an itinerant childhood before
becoming interested in dancing and acting. After various unsuccessful
auditions for teen movies, she took off for Europe, where she fell back into
modelling after running out of money. The years have not dulled the pain of
those shoots and cattle calls. “It was destructive to the self-esteem,” she
says, a tremor in her voice. “It f***ed me up. Big time. I’d hear the most
awful things. ‘Her legs aren’t long enough. Her tits aren’t big enough.
Next!’ There’s no respect for you as a human being. You’re a commodity.” She
says acting saved her from that life. First came commercials, then a
three-year sentence — sorry, stint — on the daytime soap Santa Barbara, best
described as Crossroads with a suntan. I tell her I’ve seen only a few
episodes. “You were lucky,” she retorts.
She nabbed the Soap Opera Digest Award for Outstanding Heroine: Daytime, but
never got her mitts on a Daytime Emmy for Outstanding Ingenue, for which she
was nominated three times. How that failure must haunt her now.
The parts improved. Wright Penn took the title role in the 1987 comedy The
Princess Bride, and met her future husband, not long divorced from Madonna,
when they appeared together in 1990’s State of Grace, a kind of bantamweight
Mean Streets. In Richard T Kelly’s “oral biography”, Sean Penn: His Life and
Times, Wright Penn recalls how she was invited to Penn’s hotel suite one
night during the shoot.
“I showed up there, the door was ajar, no lock. I hear, ‘Come in, come in!’ I
could tell he was in the bedroom. ‘Go ahead, have a seat...’ So I go into
the living room and sit down. He comes out wearing a pith helmet, a bola
tie, a jockstrap and cowboy boots. And I busted a gut laughing.” Six years
later, following much turbulence and sporadic separations, the couple
married. At the wedding party, Warren Beatty read from Rilke and Jack
Nicholson delivered a speech while having his trousers yanked down by Marlon
Brando. What a Hello! spread that would have made.
By the time the actress added a Penn to her name, she was already established,
yet completely mysterious. She was fast cornering the market in emotionally
damaged kamikaze types. In Forrest Gump, she was slapped around, snorted
coke and nearly jumped from a balcony before dying of Aids. In Loved, she
refused to testify against a former boyfriend who had physically abused her,
and in She’s So Lovely, she was a sassy embodiment of white-trash vulgarity.
Were these warts-and-all parts a reaction to the enforced prettiness of her
modelling days? “Absolutely not,” she snaps. “Nothing to do with it. You
just look at what serves the role. It’s funny to me when actresses say they
don’t want to get ugly. Well, are you gonna play the part or not? Shit or
get off the pot, you know?” Would she care to speculate on the coincidence
that her toughest parts, Loved and She’s So Lovely, came immediately after
her marriage? “I don’t know, to tell you the truth.” She’s Julie Christie
again — this time as a defence against the personal. “Dunno. Can’t
remember.” Case closed.
If we never quite grasp who Wright Penn is, that can only contribute to her
success in inhabiting a part. So it has proved. Her work with her husband
has been particularly fearless, whether in State of Grace, She’s So Lovely
and Hurlyburly, or acting under his direction in The Crossing Guard and The
Pledge. Better by far than rent-paying gigs such as co-starring in the Kevin
Costner vehicle Message in a Bottle. It’s surely films of that ilk to which
she refers when bemoaning “the monotony of playing the soulful,
understanding wife, the subordinate”.
Wright Penn’s alertness must have made her an invaluable member of this year’s
Cannes film festival jury, where she served under jury president Isabelle
Huppert. “Isabelle is a class act. Really bright. It was one of the greatest
experiences I’ve had, watching two or three movies every day, then to be at
a round table with your fellow artists. It was so mind-altering, so
educational. I didn’t go to college, but I understand that’s the sort of
experience you have there.”
I commend her on giving the jury prize to Andrea Arnold’s Fish Tank (“Really
fantastic,” she enthuses) and ask if she is surprised about the furore over
Lars von Trier’s violent, sexually explicit and some say misogynistic
Antichrist. “I predicted it would get that reaction,” she sighs wearily.
“It’s one of my favourite movies. Of all time. I loved it. It’s a
love-it-or-hate-it film.” Years ago, she expressed a wish to play a part
like Emily Watson’s in von Trier’s Breaking the Waves. So why not give the
devilish Dane a call? “Mmm, maybe I should,” she says, stretching out on the
sofa and tilting her head dreamily towards the light.
The Private Lives of Pippa Lee is released on Friday
