Giamatti, Hahn go public with ‘Private Life’
PARK CITY, Utah – “It takes three to make a family.”
So reads the head-scratching pamphlet at a fertility clinic that sends beleaguered spouses Richard (Paul Giamatti) and Rachel (Kathryn Hahn) on a draining, darkly humorous journey to conceive in Private Life, one of this year’s Sundance Film Festival selections.
The Netflix original movie, which had its world premiere at the Eccles Theatre, is the first film from writer/director Tamara Jenkins since her 2008 dramatic comedy The Savages, which co-starred Philip Seymour Hoffman and Laura Linney and scored two Oscar nominations.
While the latter centered on siblings who come together to care for their estranged father, Private Life explores similarly dysfunctional family dynamics through the prisms of marriage and middle age.
After multiple failed attempts at in vitro fertilization (IVF) using her own eggs, Rachel and Richard decide to try getting pregnant with the help of a donor. Their desired candidate? Sadie ( Godless’ Kayli Carter), their precocious 25-year-old step-niece, who comes to live with the couple in New York after dropping out of liberal arts college.
Aimless and eager to please them, Sadie gladly agrees to donate one of her eggs. But tensions start to simmer as Sadie’s mother, Cynthia (Molly Shannon), vehemently opposes her daughter’s choice out of fear that she may jeopardize her own ability to conceive when she’s older. Rachel and Richard, too, grow distant as the tedium of doctor’s appointments and hormone injections all but obliterates their sex life.
Jenkins, who is married with an 8-year-old daughter, says the idea for the movie sprang from her own experiences with fertility treatments.
“It’s not a memoir by any means,” she assured festival-goers in a post-screen- ing Q&A. But through talking to friends about IVF, “I discovered that a lot of people I knew in my circle were going through something very similar to this. I started noticing that it was something beyond myself.”
Hahn and Giamatti, who met over a homemade pasta dinner with Jenkins, were drawn to her tender, perceptive script.
“These scenes were so well-written that they weren’t hard to act,” Giamatti said. “They were emotionally difficult, but my biggest fear was that I was going to screw up these things up that were so beautifully written.”
Ultimately, they hope that the film starts a dialogue about women’s health at a time when reproductive rights have come under attack.
Cynthia and Sadie “have a conversation in the film about it, where (her mom) says, ‘You should be freezing your eggs and not selling them,’ ” Carter said. “But women shouldn’t have to only think about their fertility first. I think that’s a really beautiful part of this movie: that there shouldn’t be a stigma about taking care of yourself first, and then thinking about (having children).”
With the exception of gripes about its running time (2 hours, 10 minutes),
Private Life was warmly embraced. On Twitter, the Los Angeles Times’ Mark Olsen praised Giamatti and Hahn’s “powerful, nuanced performances,” and
Time Out New York film critic Joshua Rothkopf hailed Jenkins’ “witty and beautifully calibrated” screenplay.
Although some have already named it an Oscar contender — an inevitable part of every festival as critics race to proclaim the next awards juggernaut — the film faces an uphill battle. If Netflix continues to largely forgo theatrical runs, the streaming service will have to work hard to ensure that it doesn’t get buried before viewers and voters have a chance to watch.
A release date hasn’t yet been announced.