Source: https://natuvitro.com/u/ndbyczDH_Private-Life-Netflix-2018-still.webp
In a world obsessed with success and productivity, the inability to have children is often perceived as a personal failure. Movies rarely tackle this topic with sufficient honesty; infertility either serves as a secondary motif for drama or is miraculously resolved in the final minutes. Tamara Jenkins’ film Private Life breaks this silence. It is an uncompromisingly honest, painfully realistic, and surprisingly funny portrait of a marriage going through the meat grinder of assisted reproductive technology (ART).
Plot: Conception by appointment
The film introduces us to Rachel (Katherine Hahn) and Richard (Paul Giamatti), a bohemian couple in their forties living in New York. They are writers and intellectuals who live in an apartment filled with books and vinyl records. Their life seems complete, except for one detail: they don’t have a child.
Private Life does not begin at the start of their journey, but at the moment when they are already deep in the rabbit hole. They have tried everything: years of attempts, unsuccessful IVF (in vitro fertilization) cycles, painful injections, huge bills, and agonizing waiting. Their life, their sex, their finances, and their conversations are all subordinated to one goal. They are also trying to adopt a child, but this process turns out to be a bureaucratic and humiliating marathon.
When another IVF cycle fails, their doctor suggests a new, radical step for them: IVF with egg donation. That’s when Sadie (Kaley Carter), their 25-year-old niece who dropped out of college and came to live with them, enters the picture. She sees their struggle and, in a burst of youthful altruism, offers to be their donor. This step, which seems like it should solve all their problems, only complicates an already fragile situation.
Analysis: More than just IVF
Director Tamara Jenkins (The Savages) approaches the material with precision. This is not so much a film about the desire to have a child as it is a film about what life becomes when that desire becomes an obsession.
1. The medicalization of marriage
The main achievement of Private Life is the deromanticization of the process. The film clearly shows how medical intervention supplants intimacy. Sex is no longer an act of love, but a mechanical procedure on a schedule. Rachel and Richard’s bodies become objects of medical manipulation. Their bedroom turns into a treatment room with boxes of syringes and hormone patches.
The film is relentless in its detail: awkward visits to the sperm bank, the indifferent faces of nurses, conversations about “follicle quality” over dinner. Jenkins shows how the language of medicine completely replaces the language of emotions.
2. The acting duo: fatigue and tenderness
Katherine Hahn and Paul Giamatti are the heart of the film. They don’t play tragedy; they play exhaustion.
Katherine Hahn (Rachel) gives one of the best performances of her career. Her Rachel is a bundle of rage, hope, despair, and biting sarcasm. She is not a “noble sufferer.” She is prickly, embittered by a world that has been unfair to her, and at the same time desperately vulnerable. She Googles her symptoms at 3 a.m. and is willing to believe in any pseudoscientific diet if it gives her even a one percent chance.
Paul Giamatti (Richard) is the perfect partner. His character is quieter, he tries to be a pillar of strength, but he is also broken. He supports his wife, but his fatigue shows in the little things — in the way he looks at the empty nursery they set up for the adoption that never happened, or in his attempts to “creatively” donate his biomaterial at the clinic. There is still love between them, but it is buried under tons of medical protocols.
3. Ethical gray areas
When Sadie’s niece enters the picture, the film asks the most difficult questions. What motivates Sadie? A sincere desire to help, or youthful narcissism and the need to “do something meaningful”? What motivates Rachel and Richard when they accept her offer? Is it an act of hope or selfish exploitation of a young girl in a vulnerable position?
The film does not provide answers. It simply shows the awkwardness of the situation: joint visits to the gynecologist, discussion of the contract, an awkward family dinner where everyone knows what is really going on.
Verdict: A mirror for “private life”
Private Life is a quiet film with no big dramatic explosions. Its drama lies in the accumulated fatigue, the unspoken resentments, the two-week wait for the test results. The humor in the film is a defensive reaction, laughter through tears at the absurdity of the whole situation.
Tamara Jenkins has made a film not about infertility, but about human resilience and where the line between hope and self-destruction lies. This is a film for anyone who has ever desperately wanted something and feared they would not succeed. It offers no easy solutions and avoids a Hollywood happy ending, leaving its characters (and the audience) in a state of painful uncertainty.
This is an important, mature, and incredibly moving film about what happens behind closed bedroom doors, in the silence of doctors’ offices, and in the darkest corners of our “private lives.”
