Does it matter that Tamara Jenkins’ newest movie, “Private Life,” is only getting one of those mini boutique theatrical releases at the same time being released somewhere into the unknown algorithm wilds of Netflix for the whole nation to see? Would it have been better if this smart and sharp, if occasionally baggy, comedy had gotten just the miniature release in the fall Oscar run-up, then limped along through the end of the year as only small-budgeted character dramas can, before finally ending up on one or the other streaming services anyway? Is unintentionally not allowing people convenience to see a work of art worthy in itself? Does rarity make the thing itself better?
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That’s the sort of question the literary-minded characters in this half-comedic drama might have had a good donnybrook about. Theoretically, this is a story about a married couple, Rachel (Kathryn Hahn) and Richard (Paul Giamatti), who have been trying to get pregnant for so long and by so many different means that their friends and family are starting to worry about them. That quest for a baby is where things begin and end, as well as a big driver of the meanderingly spaghetti-strand material in between. As a direct result of Rachel and Richard turning their lives inside out while chasing the dream, we get drama, pathos, comedy, and a big heaping helping of mishegoss. But it’s by no means all that Jenkins is writing about.
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“Private Life” is a warning, filled with people who know what they want but maybe shouldn’t get it. By the time we run into Rachel and Richard, they’re been on the baby hunt for so long, it’s practically become their identity. At one point in the past, Richard was an underground theater director of some renown (well, the “Village Voice” liked him, at least). There’s some indication that he still works somehow in theater, but his day job is with an outfit called The Pickle Guy. (That rent-stabilized apartment on Avenue A won’t pay for itself.) Rachel is a writer, but except for her blowup from her about the generically chic-lit cover her publisher designed for her novel, you would barely know it. Their life is all about the baby.
“I think you hit a nerve,” Rachel snarks at Richard after he jabs her with a syringe full of hormones, in the movie’s telling first line. Afterward, we see them going from one appointment to the next, their poverty-frayed and baby-less anxieties fizzing and popping in their hyper-literate heads. It’s a grueling march and one that Jenkins doesn’t quite shield the viewer from, both to the movie’s credit and detriment. The couple go at each other like sleepy snipers facing off across no man’s land, Rachel played by the clockwork-timed Hahn as an obsessing and grim-minded chatterbox of bad omens and cutting remark and Richard portrayed by Giamatti as another of his patented half-grumpy half-cockeyed optimists.
Instead of an actual baby, what upends everything is the arrival of their semi-niece (it’s complicated) Sadie (Kayli Carter). A moony, sort of goony 25-year-old Bard dropout with half-realized notions of being a writer, Sadie is waging a guerrilla war against her parents (Molly Shannon and John Carroll Lynch) and her latest offensive is going to the city to live in semi-ironic struggling artist splendor with her “cool” aunt and uncle. “You guys were so great!” Sadie enthuses to Richard while looking at pictures of his old theater gang. “Tell that to the NEA,” he responds in grumbling fashion but sparkily, unable to pretend he’s not happy about the praise.
Much of “Private Life” goes by like that. It’s written in snippets, one almost self-contained moment of getting impregnated drama (doctor Denis O’Hare cheerily serving up the latest that-didn’t-work-but-this-crazy-expensive-thing-just-might news) or domestic squabble coming after the other. It’s canny, knowing writing, playing to its main characters’ literary backgrounds – they’re the kind of people who can throw around Harold Brodkey’s name without it seeming forced – while highlighting the absurdity of this anxiety-fountain of a quest.
Although the plot, such as it is, can feel randomized, Jenkins is hardly making a slapdash comedy here. The cinematography by Christos Voudouris is mostly a series of tableaus, resonatingly wintry in tone and attractively formal. Her writing, like that in “The Savages,” is precision-tooled sharp, though erring toward the mopey at times. With its characters so precisely portrayed both in their cultural milieus and constant insecurities and guilts, there would be a sense that Jenkins is threading the New York needle somewhere between the neatly charted introspection of Nicole Holofcener and the sarcastic self-referentialism of Noah Baumbach. Except Jenkins wrote and directed her first movie twenty years ago, “Slums of Beverly Hills,” so is more likely than not just trying to say her piece.
None of the adults in this bittersweet movie would say that it’s good to have anything you want, instantly. Sadie’s parents don’t think that her crashing on Avenue A is the best idea, especially once Rachel and Richard, having run out of other options, start hunting around for young women looking to sell some eggs for a few thousand dollars. Richard isn’t certain that having a baby even makes sense anymore for the two of them. And as for Rachel, on a good day, she’s a couple heartbeats from a panic attack, so it’s anybody’s guess whether she will actually be able to carry through with a pregnancy.
In the end, no, it probably doesn’t matter that anybody with a Netflix password can watch the A-grade “Private Life” instead of having to schlep to the theater. As long as somebody was able to fund and produce this flinty and funny movie, that ultimately matters more than whether it should truly end up just one more piece of content buried in the algorithm under that catchall generic phrase, “Independent Comedy.”
Check out all our coverage from the 2018 New York Film Festival here.