Netflix’s Fertility Dramedy Private Life Is Funny, Warm & Moving

Welcome back Ms. Jenkins!

Private Life stars Kathryn Hahn and Paul Giamatti.

(Photo Courtesy: Netflix)

In this fleet-footed world, Tamara Jenkins is an outlier. A decade after she earned an Original Screenplay Oscar nomination for The Savages, the writer-director made her next film, Private Life - a Netflix production starring Kathryn Hahn and Paul Giamatti. A Tamara film, then is an event to look forward to. But far from showy spectacles, Jenkins’ films are preoccupied with the smaller intimacies.

It’s not the grand canvas of a devastating drama that seems to interest her. Her forte lies in probing the crevices of tragedies, the incognito woes. The writer-director mines uneasy moments for bittersweet humour. Armed with a penchant for finding pearls in the dark folds of life, Jenkins draws acutely well-observed portraits of families.

A still from Private Life.(Photo Courtesy: Netflix)

Private Life, follows the journey of a couple in their 40s, struggling with IVF and their ‘by-any-means-necessary-effort’ to have a child. If couples who are trying in vain to conceive, find the film resonant, they should know that Jenkins drew on her own exasperating experience to write the film.

Rachel (Hahn) is a writer whose new novel is on the cusp of being published. Richard (Giamatti), who would earlier run an experimental theatre, now, runs an artisanal pickle company. In the opening scene of the film, we hear hushed voices of a couple mingled with some sheet rustling. With Kathryn Hahn’s lower body framed sensually, Giamatti asks her to scoot over. But it’s not what we think. This is not a love-making scene or a post-coital phase. Soon Giamatti is jabbing a hypodermic needle into her hip. Jenkins flings us into the throes of the couple’s fertility drill right at the start, subverting our expectations from a bedroom scene.

Belying the title of the film, the most private portions of this couple’s life are laid bare, what with endocrinologists enthusiastically declaring, “let’s get pregnant” while Rachel has sprawled herself in an unflattering position and ‘prog rock’ playing in the background in a clinical setting. In case of Richard, watching porn to ejaculate in a cup, in a fertility clinic only elicits annoyance.

A still from Private Life.(Photo Courtesy: Netflix)

Jenkins is interested in puncturing the romantic notions of heterosexual intimacy, while shining a light on Richard and Rachel’s trials. Despite their most intimate moments being peopled, the alienation of their experience is sublimely rendered.

A still from Private Life.(Photo Courtesy: Netflix)

The film also parts with a fitting retort for those who judgementally suggest adoption as an option for couples grappling with infertility. Its depiction of the tenuous bonds formed online with potential birth mothers is heartbreakingly compassionate.

Hahn’s raw yet understated performance makes the film much more than a breezy dramedy about intellectuals exchanging witty repartees. Her sorrow flickers to the screen in flares. Hahn’s Rachel personifies whirlwind emotions. She is so vulnerable that the most innocuous triggers can set her off.

Some striking scenes from the film follow her plunging headlong into irrational talk like blaming second wave feminism for not being able to make up her mind early enough about having kids or bringing up references to Rosemary’s Baby and The Handmaid’s Tale. She has put off having a baby and the lack of control on her biology has not diminished her. But her volatility never gets caricaturish or stereotypical.

Eyes hooded, lips pursed, and a smile always lurking around the corners of his mouth, Giamatti’s turn in Private Life as a kind, tender companion is unlike his usual conniving or sassy avatars. He conjures his woundedness and his masculine menopausal angst with gentleness and maturity. Giamatti’s Richard is agreeable even when he is in the midst of an ugly disagreement with his wife, always making the effort to find the right words to convey his desolation. Even their skirmishes are testaments to long habit and firm belonging.

In one of her interviews, Jenkins mentions that as a genre, she conceptualised Private Life as a buddy movie, where instead of hitchhiking or planning a heist, the couple is on a journey through infertility land. At its heart, the film is not a critique of the fertility industry but an ode to companionship that proves its mettle with every curveball that life throws up. Less about the obstinacy to procreate and more about unexpected insights, it in fact suggests that persistence may not always be a virtue.

A still from Private Life.(Photo Courtesy: Netflix)

Accomplished in its pace and tone, Private Life doesn’t surrender to the temptation of miraculous twists but still throws up delightful surprises. When Sadie, their niece moves in with the couple, the film subtly unpacks some stirring insights about surrogacy. Jenkins strips topics draped in discreetness of their cloaks of shame to reveal the mutual crisis of partners who finally ask of themselves, ‘Who are we without this pursuit?’

The climax is a masterly treatise on yearning. Even when Private Life is navigating the uncomfortable, complex terrain, it works like warm, comfort fare that can thaw the frosty corners of your inner life. That’s Jenkins for you - she will point you to new shoots sprouting where you least expect them after a forest is burned down.