“Private Life” gives us an intrusive and often funny look into a couple’s struggle to conceive. If only director Tamara Jenkins’ dramedy stayed as grounded as its relatable premise. “Fertility junkies” is what friends call Rachel (Kathryn Hahn) and Richard (Paul Giamatti). The married New Yorkers, who are respectively 41 and 47, have tried for years to get pregnant, but have been stymied by sperm and egg troubles. They’re fixtures at local clinics and drop thousands on experimental therapies. Those hospital bits are a scream. When Richard tries to, um, deliver his specimen, the TV remote control breaks and the porn on-screen blares at full volume. Giamatti’s reaction is hilarious. All else having failed, they ask their 25-year-old non-biological niece Sadie (Kayli Carter) for one of her eggs. That’s when things get too weird. While the request from the desperate, wannabe parents is certainly believable, what you don’t buy is the way Sadie is treated by them in the film. She becomes a kind of strange, live-in lover minus the sex or romance. It’s creepy — and loses the audience in the end.<doc-sep>Private Life type Movie The title of Tamara Jenkins’ new Netflix drama about a married couple struggling with infertility, Private Life, is ironically cruel. After all, there’s nothing private about the emotional and physical hell these two are going through: Everyone has an opinion or a tone-deaf nugget of advice about their uphill reproductive odyssey. Not only is Mother Nature working against them, the whole world seems to be. Jenkins, the Oscar-nominated writer-director of 2007’s The Savages, nails the smallest, most minute details of the IVF process with a jeweler’s precision: the hormone shots and egg retrievals, the financial strains and fights, the hope and despair. I realize that probably makes this exquisite film sound clinical and slightly depressing. And aside from a few laughs when you need them most, it does have some rough moments. But thankfully, it also has Kathryn Hahn and Paul Giamatti, who aren’t just convincing as married New York artists who’d give anything for a child; they also subtly convey the love buried beneath all their bickering and resentment. Hope finally arrives in the form of the couple’s college-dropout niece (a radiant Kayli Carter), who moves in and offers to donate some of her eggs. But Jenkins isn’t interested in last-minute miracles or Hail Mary Hollywood happy endings. Private Life is both smaller and bigger than that. It’s about perseverance, compassion, and empathy. A-<doc-sep>It’s the morning of the New York Film Festival premiere of Private Life, and Tamara Jenkins is positively buoyant. Dressed in a goldenrod floral-print dress and loafers, the 56-year-old writer-director arrives at a Lincoln Center café smiling broadly. She is warm, chatty, effervescent — which is somewhat surprising since her film work has tackled such dark topics as dysfunctional parenting, dementia, death and, now, infertility. As she did with her 1998 feature debut, Slums of Beverly Hills (about a teenager growing up poor among rich kids in the care of her divorced dad) and her 2007 follow-up The Savages (which depicts a brother and sister coping with their estranged father’s last days), Jenkins mined her own life for the bones of Private Life. The film stars Kathryn Hahn and Paul Giamatti as Rachel and Richard, an artsy New York City couple in their forties — he’s a former theater director who now sells artisan pickles; she’s a novelist of modest success — who are desperate to have a child. They have tried IUI (intrauterine insemination), IVF (in vitro fertilization) and various routes to adoption, all to no avail. Their life is a parade of injections, doctor’s appointments, applications and evaluations, and they have nearly blown their “baby budget.” Rachel is a tangle of frayed nerves and spiky, hormonal energy, while Richard is exhausted to the point of seeming almost limp. While Jenkins is circumspect about exactly which paths she and her husband, screenwriter Jim Taylor (Sideways, The Descendants), walked before she gave birth to their daughter Mia eight years ago, she casts a wry eye on their journey to parenthood, an outlook that clearly shaped the screenplay she honed over some five years. At one point during what she calls their “fertility hell,” Jenkins and Taylor decided to see a movie between doctor’s appointments. The only viable option at the Upstate New York multiplex they visited: Judd Apatow’s Knocked Up, in which Katherine Heigl and Seth Rogen have a drunken one-night stand that results in — ta-da! — a baby. “We were sitting in the audience like, ‘Oh my god, people have sex to get pregnant, we totally forgot that part!’” Jenkins recalls. “Then we were joking as we left the theater: Theirs was called ‘Knocked Up,’ what would ours be called? And I said, ‘Knocked Down.’ We were just pummeling ourselves into unconsciousness.” The brutality of the process — the sheer emotional and physical toll it takes — accounts in part for the 11-year gap between this film and The Savages, the indie darling that earned Jenkins an Academy Award nomination for Best Original Screenplay (as well as a Best Actress nom for star Laura Linney). But family planning alone cannot entirely explain the decade-plus lag. The fact is, films like this — featuring hyper-articulate characters living complicated, specific lives that a hyper-intellectual filmmaker examines on a granular level — are simply not made very often these days. At best, they’re stretched and flattened into TV shows that overstay their narrative welcome. (Although this movie is distributed by Netflix and was released in “select theaters” on October 5th, it otherwise will be consumed via small screens.) The other fact is, it’s not easy for female filmmakers to get money from the movie business’ mostly male rainmakers. Even after they’ve been smiled upon by the Academy. On this particular day, Jenkins bypasses the chance to rail against the inherent sexism of the Hollywood machine. But she’s recently noted some curious observations: 14 years passed between Patty Jenkins directing Charlize Theron to an Oscar in Monster (2003) and her next film, a little box-office-buster called Wonder Woman; writer-director Debra Granik’s Winter’s Bone received four Oscar nominations (including Best Picture and a nod for her adapted screenplay), but it was eight years until her big-screen follow-up; Mary Harron helmed I Shot Andy Warhol (1996) and American Psycho (2000) to great acclaim but has worked almost exclusively in television for the last two decades. That Jenkins’ films are not about superheroes or cops and robbers, that they don’t project us into a dystopian future or revisit some monumental historical event, may be part of the problem. But her microscopic looks at human beings in all their complexities and vanities are vital to the cinematic landscape. Her stories are not didactic. They are observational and communal — a hug, not a finger-point. She is scrupulous not just with the female character closest in age to her; Jenkins takes years to write a script because she wants to walk in the shoes of every character until she gets them right. (As Philip Seymour Hoffman, Linney’s costar in The Savages, once said, Jenkins is “not a compromiser.”) Jojo Whilden/Netflix A pivotal player in Private Life is Sadie, Richard’s 25-year-old step-niece, who enters the picture as a potential egg donor for the aunt and uncle she idolizes. (A Bard College dropout with aspirations of becoming a writer, Sadie sees Rachel and Richard’s life through hazy, rose-colored glasses.) Played with pitch-perfect breeziness by breakout Kayli Carter, she brims with youthful conviction, idealism and naiveté. These are qualities Jenkins did not simply tap into from her own youth. Terrified that the character would feel “stale” and obviously written by someone twice Sadie’s age, she says she spent months essentially stalking women in their twenties around New York. “My pores were so open,” Jenkins says. “Anyone on the street, my babysitter, anyone in that age range was a subject for study.” Her husband’s niece, visiting on a break from college, unwittingly donated a line when she bent over to pull something from her bag and apologized for “totally whale-tailing.” Richard, too, is finely drawn in a film in which the husband could easily be positioned as a less than sympathetic male archetype. A scene of Giamatti sitting in a fertility clinic “collection room,” attempting to summon the goods on demand with the help of clinic-provided porn, will be rehashed at cocktail parties for years to come. “They have to sit in these rooms!” Jenkins marvels. “That somebody had to go out and buy porn, what a weird…who has to run that errand?” In her mind, it is not just Rachel who must endure the indignities of trying to get pregnant; it’s an unsettlingly unnatural process that batters both partners. “I remember writing down, ‘Is this a biological battle of the sexes?’” she says. “Because they turn on each other at certain points. They’re both sort of falling apart in their own way — his sperm is blocked, her eggs are old. It’s just really demoralizing. It’s bizarre to turn your body into a laboratory experiment.” It’s an experience shared by a growing number of couples, but Rachel and Richard’s particular struggles are also largely informed by their position in a socioeconomic class that is in some ways unique to New York City. As Jenkins puts it, “They’re kind of like middle-class artists, holding onto the city by the grip of their little fingers because they have a rent-stabilized apartment.” It is not what some might call “relatable.” But Jenkins bristles at any suggestion that the movie is too, for lack of a better way to say it, New Yorky. “As a writer or a filmmaker, to become general is not good,” she says. “The specificity is the art. The true, fine-grain texture of a place — and it doesn’t matter if it’s New York or Paris or South Africa — the commitment to the sense of place is very important to me.” Hence a dreamy sequence where Rachel, Richard and Sadie pick up dinner at a street cart while out walking their dogs, Jenkins’ camera lingering on the griddle’s sizzling meat and the vendor’s quick hands as he wraps up their food. Does it drive the plot? Not at all. Is it necessary? Absolutely. At heart, Private Life is not only about infertility, it is a tender but unflinching portrait of a couple in the throes of a midlife crisis.<doc-sep>
Jenkins can find a joke in even the most awkward of situations. Early on, as Rachel places her feet into stirrups ahead of an embryo implantation, her gynecologist (Denis O’Hare) asks a truly frightening question as he reaches for his remote: “Do you like prog rock?” But the director also isn’t afraid of highlighting how alienating and cold that doctor’s office can be, and how every bit of phrasing can land oddly or be quickly misunderstood. Private Life is a snapshot of a sensitive time in its central couple’s life; every fight they have is touched off by someone saying something innocuous that nonetheless hits deep. In the film, Richard’s masculinity isn’t so much being challenged as it is being temporarily ignored or discarded. He’s both an at-home nurse and an emotional sponge for his wife, unable to do much more than offer words of support and shot after shot. Rachel, meanwhile, has to throw herself into everything just to have a chance of conceiving; her efforts give the impression of total commitment to a process she’s never entirely comfortable with. Her sister Cynthia (Molly Shannon) criticizes the whole project as quixotic, suggesting it’s a way for the couple to distract from other problems in their marriage. Cynthia might be right, but it’s hard for viewers to know. The film starts in the middle of Richard and Rachel’s journey, and whatever free-spirited life they might’ve had before is only hinted at. Some narrative digressions are both fascinating and punishing: One focusing on an online service connecting adoptive parents with pregnant mothers is particularly transfixing. Private Life isn’t just about the medical hells that Rachel has to suffer, though. Eventually, the story coalesces around Cynthia’s daughter, Sadie (Kayli Carter), a girl in her early 20s who’s creatively inspired but adrift. Sadie drops out of grad school and starts crashing with Richard and Rachel; she’s enchanted by their image as Manhattan writers who met in the world of underground theater, but she slowly gets to know them better as people, too. Sadie, predictably, gets drawn into the fertility maelstrom. But Private Life doesn’t submit to easy plot twists; there are no transgressive affairs or medical miracles on the horizon. It would be a hard movie to watch if not for Jenkins’s adeptness for making the most mundane conversations enthralling, and for Giamatti’s and (especially) Hahn’s performance. Giamatti has a skill for belligerence, but Richard is softer-spoken and kinder, capable of conveying great humor and sadness without raising his voice. Hahn suggests all of Rachel’s wit and energy with just a look; her character spends so much of the film sublimating her emotions, forced into politeness, frequent apologies, and crushing resignation by a demanding process. In other words, Giamatti and Hahn are in perfect concert with their director. Private Life is Tamara Jenkins, defined: funny, mournful, and human, all at once.