"Private Life", First Visit
Saturday, October 6, 2018 at 3:00PM Chris Feil wraps up his look at the films of Tamara Jenkins with her newest film, now on Netflix...
If The Savages was like Slums of Beverly Hills all grown up and disillusioned, Private Life is like Jenkins’ first two films in conversation, and it’s maybe her wisest. Here Kathryn Hahn and Paul Giamatti play an intelligencia couple Rachel and Richard exhaustively exploring every avenue to conceive, with newcomer Kayli Carter as their young adoring niece Sadie naively slipping herself into their struggle. With this newest film, Jenkins casts her widest net of characters, all the more rewarding with the vulnerabilities of youth and middle age are in dialogue.
Jenkins chapters the film while still structuring it like messy memory, resembling a life so anxious it can only be delineated by doctor’s visits and holidays. At the point we meet them, Rachel and Richard exist in a flurry of procedures and hormonal upheaval to the point that it defines them. But despite pursuing all of their myriad expensive and physically taxing options to bring a child into their home, Private Life is really about coping with the waning amount of options life provides as we age.