Inspired by life
Director Tamara Jenkins talks about addressing marriage and infertility in new movie ‘Private Life’
Tamara Jenkins has had time to consider why there have been such long stretches between her movies. Her latest, Private Life, starring Kathryn Hahn and Paul Giamatti as a New York couple struggling with infertility treatments, comes 11 years after her last one, the Oscar-nominated The Savages.
For Jenkins’ fans, such prolonged absences (it was nine years following her 1998 debut, The Slums of Beverly Hills)
are a disappointment. For others, it’s a prime example of how the movie industry doesn’t value its female filmmakers like its male ones. For Jenkins, it’s more complicated.
“When you’re in it, you’re like: Is it me or is it them? What makes that problem, in terms of myself?” Jenkins wonders. “When I was at Sundance people kept asking me
that question. I kept saying, ‘Yeah, I know. I’m a loser. How is it possible 11 years went by?’ And then I looked around and I realised Patty Jenkins
[Wonder Woman] hadn’t made a movie and Debra Granik [Leave No Trace] hadn’t made a feature for years. So I’m not alone.”
Still, Jenkins adds, there are other factors, too. She and her husband, Jim Taylor (Alexander Payne’s frequent writing partner), had a kid in that time period — the experience of which eventually led her to writing Private Life.
And then she’s meticulous — “novel-y,” she says — in her writing process; she estimates it took two years to write Private Life, some of that time spent at the upstate New York artists’ colony Yaddo (which also figures into the film).
“It’s also a desire to not necessarily make any old thing. There are a lot of things out there that might be makeable but aren’t good. There are a lot of really bad movies,” Jenkins said in a recent interview. “And I never have had an easy time trying to get these things made.”
Private Life, which premiered on Netflix, is indeed more than its synopsis. Hahn and Giamatti play downtown New York creatives reaching middle age and going through one fertility trial after another. But in Jenkins’ hands, Private Life is a caustically funny, painfully intimate, medicalised examination of, as she says, “a marriage in the middle.” Though much of the plot follows a struggle to conceive, it’s ultimately centred on the couple.
“People ask me what it’s about and I say it’s a movie about marriage,” says Jenkins. “It’s obviously on a very specific journey that they’re on. But there was something so existential about that problem for them. It’s so primal.”
“There are a lot of things out there that might be makeable but aren’t good. There are a lot of really bad movies.” TAMARA JENKINS | Director