Mark Reviews Movies: PRIVATE LIFE

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Review by Mark Dujsik | October 5, 2018

Something happened in the lives—or, better, the shared life—of Richard (Paul Giamatti) and Rachel (Kathryn Hahn), a married couple trying to have a baby. She's 41, and he's 47. They're still living in a rent-controlled apartment in Manhattan, because they're both artists and that's how true artists live. He runs a theater company and sells pickles on the side, although, at this point in his career, those jobs might as well be reversed. She's a writer of plays, short stories, and, most recently, a novel that's about to be published.

What happened to them isn't particularly special or especially unique. There's no overtly tragic or sad event to note in their lives. They didn't have some life-altering event occur. What happened to them was simply life—the marriage, the careers, the days of work, the dreams dreamed and fulfilled to one extent or another.

Now, looking at the distinct possibility that, in the near future, they might not physically be capable of having a child together, they're hard at work trying to get Rachel pregnant. There's an actual countdown of sorts to this goal. A fertility doctor notes that she has 11 eggs left in her ovaries, so if it's going to happen, it has to happen quickly.

The situation isn't the fault of either of them. Things happen. Life has to be lived, after all. Here they are, though, and Private Life takes a good, hard, and sympathetic look at how Richard and Rachel are at this moment, when little else matters except the biological and medical requirements to have a child at this point in their lives.

To call writer/director Tamara Jenkins' film a comedy would be accurate, but it would also be a bit misleading. It's funny but mostly because its characters are funny. They're intelligent and thoughtful, skeptical in a way that lets us know that they're capable of self-reflection, and, somewhere beneath the one-track thinking of the moment, in possession of good hearts. It's just difficult to see those qualities at times, because there is little else on their minds but how to ensure that they have a child while they still can.

Desperation brings out a lot in people, but Jenkins also knows that desperation is a great source for comedy. What's refreshing about the film is that all of the comedy comes from its characters. There are, undoubtedly, some relatively absurd situations that arise here—from the intimate but unromantic routine of daily injections of fertility medication, to the way that the couple's respective fertility issues have become commonplace discussion, to a game of trying to convince the representative of an adoption agency that they're not thinking about in vitro fertilizations anymore, to looking for a potential egg donor in the way that people might shop online.

The humor isn't necessarily these situations. It's that Richard and Rachel are capable of seeing how absurd most of them are. More importantly, they're willing to acknowledge that they themselves can be quite ridiculous within these circumstances.

The story here is the couple's long and more-than-often difficult process of trying everything available to them. It begins with some tests. Things don't look too good for either of them. Rachel has limited eggs remaining, and the doctors keep talking about "maternal age" and "old ova." Richard has one testicle, and there's an obstruction that's blocking his sperm. There's a mostly unspoken tension in these biological facts. Rachel later lets them out—that, whether Richard intended it or not, has felt blamed in their previous attempts to conceive. With a better picture of the situation, she resents that feeling even more.

The talk eventually turns to finding an egg donor. Rachel has problems with the idea and further resents that Richard kept his more open thoughts on the subject to himself until now. A compromise is reached with the arrival of Sadie (Kayli Carter), the 25-year-old stepdaughter of Richard's brother Charlie (John Carroll Lynch) through his marriage to Cynthia (Molly Shannon). She's looking for a place to stay while she figures out her life.

There are a few ways that this story could proceed. To Jenkins' credit, she takes the most straightforward approach, in which the Richard and Rachel are honest to Sadie and considerate of her feelings on the matter, while Sadie is thrilled with the idea helping two people she genuinely loves.

The external complications are kept to a minimum. Some things feel out of place, mostly Cynthia's character, who opposes the idea but is mostly a hollow obstacle. There's also a romantic interest for Sadie in the personage of Sam (Desmin Borges), one of Richard's employees, who exists primarily to show Jenkins' restraint—by not introducing the most obvious complication.

Instead, the complications here are psychological and emotional. Both Giamatti and Hahn show real delicacy in their performances—their respective feelings of inadequacy and fear, as well as the constant tightrope that they have to walk, in order to say what needs to be said, without saying the wrong thing, and to prevent themselves from falling into despair. Carter is quite good, too, playing Sadie as naïve and aimless—but not to the extent that she's unaware of challenges before her.

The relationship between these three, all lost in some distinct but uniting way, allows us to see the deeper levels and potential within each of these characters. Private Life itself reveals its own levels. That's especially true of the third act, which eventually—and rather cheekily—gives us a "Nine months later" title. The revelation of that jump in time isn't what we expect or what the characters want, but it is what they have needed this entire time. They simply forgot, because life, as it so often does, got in the way.

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