Promotional Photo

Keanu Reeves fixes his gaze upon Robin Wright Penn

The Private Lives of Pippa Lee
Connecticut Film Festival. Sat., Nov. 21. Palace Theater, 165 Main St., Danbury. Cocktails at 6:30 p.m.; film screening at 7:30 p.m., followed by an after-party at Two Steps Downtown Grille. $10. www.ctfilmfest.com

The Connecticut Film Festival couldn't have asked for more of a Connecticut film. The CFF, whose main event occurs in May, builds momentum year-round with a series of special one-night screenings. On Nov. 21, the new season kicks off with the first U.S. theatrical showing of The Private Lives of Pippa Lee. Not only was the romantic drama set and shot in the state, its director Rebecca Miller and several of the cast members (including the great Alan Arkin) have called Connecticut home. Such familiarity gives the picture a lived-in feeling to which fellow residents will easily relate.

The Private Lives of Pippa Lee is based on Miller's novel of the same name, released last year. Both versions concern a woman who's turning 50 but whose idea of middle age is skewed by the fact that she's married to a man three decades older than she. When Pippa Lee's workaholic New York publisher husband decides to move to a rest home in Connecticut, she cheerily sees fresh opportunities. Her grown son, however, castigates her as "an adaptable enigma," and it quickly becomes clear that Pippa's apparently flexibility is at the expense of her own feelings and freedoms.

In a phone interview last week — part of a promotional blitz Miller is doing for the film as it leaves the international festival circuit for a limited run in cinemas starting Nov. 27 — the writer/director says she always intended the story to be a novel and the idea for making a film from it came later. "I needed to find the heart of the thing. It had to develop in a deeper sense."

One essential character of the film that's more subdued in the book version is the state of Connecticut, which Miller lovingly captures in all its scenic glories and contradictions. Pippa Lee was filmed in Danbury, New Milford and Stamford. Miller, whose earlier films include The Ballad of Jack and Rose and Personal Velocity: Three Portraits, says the decision to shoot on location was cinched by the tax credit incentives Connecticut now provides to filmmakers.

As she filmed, Miller says she became fascinated with place she'd taken for granted as a Connecticut resident. After searching "everywhere" for an appropriate house for one of the more settled characters, Miller found the ideal location right in her old hometown of Roxbury. (Though she now lives primarily in Ireland, Miller still owns the Roxbury house she inherited from her parents.)

She talks about the aesthetic of grocery stores and expresses pride that "the fishmonger in the film is an actual fishmonger I know from Southbury." She's particularly happy to have captured Connecticut in the springtime. "Usually, I'm shooting in the summer, because of my children. It was lovely to be able to shoot in the spring."

The film's cast is filled with notables, and even the lesser names set the mind reeling. Activist and Ivy League African American Studies professor Cornel West makes a cameo as a dinner guest. Herb and Pippa's daughter Grace is played by Zoe Kazan, whose grandfather Elia Kazan directed the premiere of Death of a Salesman by Rebecca Miller's father Arthur Miller; Elia and Arthur's friendship famously fell apart in the 1950s when Kazan assisted the Hollywood blacklisters in the House UnAmerican Activities Committee while Miller refused. The varied energies of the actors in this wide-ranging drama give the film an ensemble feel despite its focus on the title character.

Pippa Lee, played by Robin Wright Penn, has to cope not just with her aging husband's emotional abuses and caretaking requirements, but with the social and romantic stresses placed upon her by the other men suddenly crowding her life. One of them is played by the unassuming Mike Binder, another by the very much assuming Keanu Reeves.

The women in Pippa's private lives are portrayed by such diverse talents as Winona Ryder, Maria Bello and scene-stealing screen veteran Shirley Knight.

Especially when compared to his grizzled grandfather role in Little Miss Sunshine, Alan Arkin looks positively dashing as the octagenarian literary scion Herb Lee. "Doesn't he?," Miller agrees. She says when she first approached Arkin to play this elderly, morally impaired character, he turned it down, saying, "I don't really want to have this experience. I know this man." Then, Arkin proceeded to provide her with an intensely detailed breakdown of the character, an invented backstory that involved "so much betrayal" and nailed Herb Lee perfectly. After "his manager, his lawyer and his agent all yelled at him," Miller says, Arkin convinced himself to take the role.

The incandescent cast list — and Miller's own celebrity connections as the daughter of Arthur Miller and wife of Daniel Day Lewis — conjures up gossipy subtexts of break-ups, breakdowns and creative breakthroughs, but the writer/director insists that "it would be misleading to say that any of this is autobiographical. While you always put something of yourself into a project like this, this is not based on people I know, in any real sense. It's a work of imagination." One that not just chronicles the vulnerabilities, vicissitudes and vile deceptions of everyday upper-class people, but involves props such as a loyal pet dog, a handgun, a safety razor, medical tubes, Keanu Reeve's heavily tattooed chest ... and the state of Connecticut.