Movie Review: Private Life

Private Life **** / *****

Directed by: Tamara Jenkins.

Written by: Tamara Jenkins.

Starring: Kathryn Hahn (Rachel), Paul Giamatti (Richard), Kayli Carter (Sadie), John Carroll Lynch (Charlie), Denis O’Hare (Dr. Dordick), Molly Shannon (Cynthia), Emily Robinson (Charlotte).

 

Rachel and Richard (Kathryn Hahn and Paul Giamatti) are a middle-aged couple, living in an apartment in New York City. They were once young artists, who dreamed of big time success in the city, and now have to settle for what they have ended up with. He once ran an experimental theater group that got a lot of good reviews, but that theater space is now a bank, and he runs a company making pickles. She is a writer, and at least a moderately successful one, as her latest novel is being published – but not so successful that she gets to pick the cover of the book. She hates what they have picked, which makes her book look like “generic chick lit” – and that’s not what she wrote. She doesn’t understand the marketing angle of this business they tell her – a point she concedes.

 

As a couple, they’ve waited to have kids – and waited, and waited and waited. He’s now 47, she’s 41, and now that they want to have kids, it is proving increasingly difficult. They tried a bunch of procedures before, nothing works, then tried adoption, and got their hearts broken. They are back to trying medical procedures once again – while leaving open the idea of adoption. They are so dedicated to this, that it seems like everything else in their lives – including their own marriage – has taken a backseat. They have gotten so wrapped in this, they don’t even question it anymore. When their doctor tells them their best hope may be to stop trying to use Rachel’s eggs, but to find someone else – someone younger – and use their eggs, they aren’t sure. They don’t like the idea of a stranger’s DNA being in the mix. When Sadie (Kayli Carter), the stepdaughter of Richard’s brother Charlie (John Carroll Lynch) – a 25-year-old college kid, still “searching” comes to stay with them, they think maybe she would be a good donor. They’ll pay her the same as they would a stranger (although they are strapped for cash). Sadie stays with them as they go through this strange process.

 

Private Life is written and directed by Tamara Jenkins – an immensely talented filmmaker who last film was the wonderful The Savages (2007) – starring the late Philip Seymour Hoffman alongside Laura Linney, as a brother and sister caring for their elderly father, and whose film before that was Slums of Beverley Hills (1998), about a teenage whose family is constantly moving from one low rent place to another, around the outskirts of Beverley Hills. Why it takes Jenkins a decade to make each film, I don’t know – but we can hope the same pattern doesn’t repeat itself this time. All of her films are perched on the edge between comedy and drama, both able to break you down into either laughs or tears.

 

Here, she has perfectly cast her film with Hahn and Giamatti, who are playing such specific types that they verge on cliché, but are able to make them feel real. They have become obsessed with this one idea – this idea of having a baby – that it has blinded them to everything else. It is also a portrait of their ever changing neighborhood in New York – which was once cheap, but has, of course, become gentrified over the years – perhaps starting all those years ago when they moved in, and now ironically, the same thing is being done to them – they are being priced out of their own neighborhood. They are now the old people in the building – the ones hanging on to their idea of the city. They visit his brother in the suburbs and, perhaps for the first time, it seems less like selling out, and more like comfort.

 

Both lead performances are spot on. This is a role right in Giamatti’s wheelhouse – the tightly wound guy who is on the verge of going off half-cocked in a fit of exasperation and well-earned rage, but who is also capable of intelligence and kindness. Hahn’s role is more difficult and layered – as she struggles with feelings of inadequacy, and lashes out in blame. They fight with each other in those kind of fights married people have – where you feel they are going over the same ground again and again. Neither of them are really right, but neither are wrong either. When they stop fighting, it’s at least as much about being tired than anything else.

 

Private Life is one of those films like that – one in which the characters feel lived in and real – where you can recognize the ways in which their assholes, and the ways in which they are nice, kind people at the same time. For most of the movie, Rachel and Richard are so wrapped up in the idea of having a baby, they forget why they want a baby. Had the film ended a scene earlier, it would have been a heartbreaking finale – but the film presses on for one more scene, and it works here. Perhaps in the intervening 9 months, they have figured something out.