Private Life – ***½

Private Life (Tamara Jenkins, 2018) – Full Original – Family Drama

Reported Budget: $9 million

Rachel (Kathryn Hahn) and Richard (Paul Giamatti) are a 40-something couple living in a small Manhattan apartment and are desperate to start a family. At the film’s outset they have already spent years and great sums of money on medical treatments and adoption processes all to no avail. The film follows their decision to try IVF with donor eggs as their latest attempt. This particular process comes to involve Richard’s 25 year-old step-niece which causes all sorts of family rancor.

Despite their apparent lack of a clear genre label like “action” or “horror”, films like Private Life, or The Land of Steady Habits, or The Meyerowitz Stories still make up a body of work that is just as cohesive as any other genre of film-making. This will not come as news to anyone who follows film closely but it bears repeating, particularly when you see Private Life’s director Tamara Jenkins giving interviews describing the film as not having a genre and Netflix as the best place for such films (LINK). Netflix is as aware of this fact as any other American studio, having set up a division within their film set-up to target this niche and having made Sundance and SXSW key festivals on their calendars from very early on in their film push.

This is all a way of opening up a discussion of Private Life one of the more critically lauded “indie” films (and I should say that I despise this term as it is misleading and belittling in equal measure; but it happens to be ubiquitous so what can you do?) released by Netflix over the last couple of years. Critical acclaim itself is part of the basic elements of this genre, without it the films disappear quickly. But it is also a genre that is tailored to critical expectations and film critics generally fall into the core audience demographics for the films, as in they are usually white, American, male and over 35. Put positively this means they can relate to themes of the films; put negatively, their biases can sometimes skew the reviews and encourage overpraising.

I should note at this point that I myself am the stereotypical film critic, a white American man in his 40s, with approximately Paul Giamatti’s amount of hair. My life mirrors that of Private Life in many ways, being a pretentious intellectual, living in a big city and having to turn to blogging instead of artisan pickle making. (Just kidding on the last point, I make no money doing this.) I have also dealt with questions of when and if to have a family, though luckily without the complications that face the couple in the film and therefore not feeling the frustration that Richard or Rachel experiences.

So I personally found a lot to like and admire in Private Life, but I am going to try to be careful not to overemphasize my personal enjoyment of the film, because I do think that the film is being slightly overrated in its ongoing critical reception. The film does the indie things well: It takes on a tough issue with frankness and honesty. The screenplay and performances are all true to life and we can recognize ourselves in the film. Tone is handled in interesting ways so there are just enough laughs to keep us from crying throughout the movie. (My personal favorite comic part involves a prog rock-loving OB GYN.) And most importantly, the film makes us feel Rachel and Richard’s pain and frustration and never gives us easy answers to the problems we see.

My main reservations about the film, however, is precisely that is so conventional for its genre. This begins for me with the casting and performances. It is no less surprising that Giamatti and Hahn would be cast in these roles than Liam Neeson would be cast in an action movie about an ex-CIA agent who has to come out of retirement for…reasons. Even if the two give genuinely terrific performances, I don’t think we see much range from either star. Hahn’s performance is so in keeping with her previous work that I would have believed you if you told me this was a Transparent spinoff in which Rabbi Raquel moves to New York and is still dealing with her fertility problems. Giamatti too seems to be playing the exact same character he played in Sideways and many other roles. This aspect of the film is in direct contrast to Meyerowitz and Steady Habits where we are surprised by Adam Sandler’s casting and Ben Mendelsohn’s performance, respectively. Private Life feels more by the numbers in comparison.

The novelty of the film is its depiction of fertility challenges. It is unrelenting with this theme and by the end of the film you feel the exhaustion of the main characters, in part because we’re not given any parallel storylines or other forms of escape from that main plot. In this sense, the film’s narrative structure bears out Cynthia’s (Molly Shannon) observation that Rachel and Richard are “fertility addicts”. This becomes unpleasant for the viewer after a while, just as being around a heroin addict gets unpleasant in 6 Balloons. But that film was only 75 minutes long, whereas Private Life is much longer, over two hours in the end. This was a miscalculation as the theme becomes too tiresome in the end for even a sympathetic audience. If it were 20-30 minutes shorter, the film could have had its cake and eaten it too, we’d have felt the pain, but not for so long that we wanted to escape the movie.

One final note is that Molly Shannon was terrific in the movie, but underused. This combined with her scene-stealing turn in HBO’s Divorce makes me think we’re not paying enough attention to the actor that she is revealing herself to be.

 

Netflix Tendencies

Underrepresented Groups

Tamara Jenkins went 11 years between features and was able to make an autobiographical film in this case, which makes it a clear cut case of Netflix supporting a female auteur.

Difficult Themes

Nobody wants to see a film about fertility challenges like these, nor will many more mainstream films on the subject end the way this one does.

Small Cast and Limited Locations

Most of the film is made up of scenes with Rachel, Richard and step-niece Sadie (Kayli Carter) and take place in their apartment. These add a great deal to the film’s feeling of intimacy, but they also limit how much screen time Shannon gets, which was a drawback.

Netflix Stars

Believe it or not, Hahn appears in the Adam Sandler vehicle The Do Over.