Best Keanu: “I’m an asshole. I don’t know why. I just always have been.”

Chris Nadeau, Keanu’s character in The Private Lives of Pippa Lee, is not an asshole — despite what he tells Pippa in the car one day. He’s a young, newly divorced convenience store clerk who’s returned home to live with his mother. He sports a large chest tattoo of Jesus. At one point, he tells Pippa he applied to join the seminary, but the church — apparently not viewing him as priest material — rejected him.

Near the very end of the film, her husband in the hospital, Pippa sits with Chris in the back of his truck. He suggests they pray for her husband. Then, looking up from clasped palms, he kisses her. In a few moments his hand strokes her belly and is in her pants; she cries in pleasure and with tears.

This is, so far that I’ve seen, the second film in the Keanu Reeves filmography where he uses his hand to make a woman come — the other is Siberia, where he does a quick trick with his thumb that you might miss if you blink. Neither character seems to mind his technique. In Pippa Lee, it appears like it was intended to be symbolic of the woman’s need to have an emotional release.

A release from what, though, it’s hard to tell. I don’t quite understand the point of Pippa Lee. At first I thought it would be another exploration of the lives of rich people, a la Something’s Gotta Give, a trope I don’t much care for. But then Pippa Lee looks back on the main character’s upbringing, her drug addict mother, her lesbian aunt, and her artist boyfriend who would eventually lead to her meeting her current husband. The point of this woman’s story is hard to figure. On its own, it’s not all that interesting. Its messaging, if there’s meant to be one, is muddled, and you don’t really care to decipher it.

Winona Ryder is in this too, although she and Keanu never share a scene. Julianne Moore, Alan Arkin, Maria Bello, Monica Bellucci, Robin Wright Penn — it’s a good cast for a lousy movie. Seeing Keanu with a Jesus tattoo is the only highlight, but even his character seems ill placed. Pippa sees in him… well, who knows? She may merely find him interesting, or attractive, or an easy escape from the life she no longer wants to lead.

At the end of the film, when her husband dies and Chris and Pippa take off together, you’re happy for them. But you don’t like Pippa any more, or any less, than you did at the beginning of the film — because her story is so convoluted, and the cast of characters in this film so unreal, feeling like characters in an art film instead of people you might know in real life and can relate to — since you are never sure whether or not you should dismiss her or root for her.

This is a tiring film with not much of a payoff. But Keanu looks good, he’s often shirtless, and he gets his Jesus on even though in the movie Chris claims to no longer be a Christian.

August 2022