If getting a film every 10 years or so from writer-director Tamara Jenkins means something like Private Life, it’s worth the wait.
Her latest movie premiered on opening night of the 2018 Sundance Film Festival and is a deeply felt look at the messy realities of marriage and the difficulties of infertility. Kathryn Hahn and Paul Giamatti star as a couple coming to terms with what they really want from themselves, each other and their life together.
The film feels like a series of secret conversations — the moments one has in private with a partner that the rest of the world never sees.
“That was so important to me,” Jenkins said in an interview ahead of the festival on having the film feel personal. “Have I been married? Yes. I was very interested in the expression of marriage in the movie, the feeling of what it is. So in terms of Paul and Kathryn, the actors, and our assignment as a team, making it feel lived-in and real was obviously high up on our list.
“I mean, it’s called Private Life, so you’re seeing things we don’t necessarily see. I’ve certainly never seen this movie.”
In the film, which Netflix plans to release later this year, Hahn and Giamatti play Rachel and Richard, a couple living on the lower east side of Manhattan. She’s a novelist and playwright, and he’s an alternative theatre director now selling artisanal pickles at farmers markets. They have tried all manner of ways — “short of kidnapping,” as he says — to get a child and all have failed. When Richard’s brother’s stepdaughter Sadie (Kayli Carter) comes to stay with them after dropping out of college, they hatch a plan for her to be their egg donor.
For anyone wondering just how much of Private Life is drawn from her own experiences, Jenkins said during the Q-and-A after the Thursday night premiere, “My husband and I went through some version of this, not quite like this, but something like this.”
