An effective way to bond with an onscreen spouse—even if you’re a seasoned performer like Paul Giamatti or Kathryn Hahn—is to do collective chores.
“I had them wash all the dishes because, well, that really sums up marriage right there,” laughs writer-director Tamara Jenkins, who dined with the actors weeks before production began on “Private Life.” Jenkins assigned the unorthodox exercise after the three of them read through the script over dinner at Giamatti’s New York home. “They needed to do something tedious together. They didn’t meet again until just before we started shooting, but at least they had already made a memory together and could hold that in the back of their brains. Plus, I’d already cooked dinner; I wasn’t going to clean, too!”
The two then selected an ideal egg donor candidate as a couple, just as their characters do in “Private Life.” Initially inspired by Jenkins’ own fertility trials, the Netflix feature (out Oct. 5) centers on a middle-aged marriage, a tender stage that’s examined and further exacerbated through their struggle to become parents. This endeavor means not only entering the insular (and often impersonal) world of assisted reproduction and domestic adoption, but also swaddling a couple’s confidential conflicts in a slew of medical acronyms and costly bills.
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“The impact of infertility on a marriage is an ancient story—it’s in the Bible, Greek tragedies, and the great ‘Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?’—but now it all has a different flavor because of artificial technology,” explains Jenkins. “When you can’t do it the old-fashioned way, this thing that’s supposed to be very intimate becomes this problem that involves so many people. It pushes their behavior outside the confines of etiquette and into places that are intense and primal, which always interests me.”
“Private Life” also zooms in on the emotional consequences of infertility and aging on women in particular. “There’s a biological tyranny of being a woman—your fertility just drops off a cliff after 35! Egg-freezing is huge and changing the course of female history like the invention of the pill, but stories like, ‘She’s 55 and just had twins!’ creates a confusing vision of what assisted fertility can afford you,” says Jenkins, who has an 8-year-old daughter with her husband, fellow writer and producer Jim Taylor. “I wanted to explore it for what it is, and how all of this affects these families.”
Jenkins peppers the pic with chapter titles echoing the procedural lexicon of in vitro fertilization, montages shot using an 8mm iPhone video app, and moments of levity amid marathons of tragedy. “That’s just my natural disposition in terms of writing, and, frankly, I find it more honest in what the experience is like,” she says. “Generally, in extreme situations, there are weird, confusing, comic details that, if you were really paying attention with your eyes open, you’d see them.” Finding actors who can effortlessly straddle that line isn’t as straightforward, but Jenkins says she’d long admired how Giamatti and Hahn have “a fumbling humanity” and “fantastic comic chops that are deep and rooted.” “I don’t think all actors are funny; you can have a fantastic actor who just doesn’t have that comedy thing,” she says. “But Paul and Kathryn have this shimmer of what’s painful and what’s funny built into them, where they can play both sides of the coin.”
Though the Oscar-nominated filmmaker of “The Savages” didn’t initially mean to mine her personal life for her latest script, she echoes the advice of playwright Arthur Miller on doing so: “The best work that anybody ever writes is the work that is on the verge of embarrassing him, always.” Her litmus test? “When you’re writing and it’s uncomfortable—maybe there’s even a little bit of shame—that’s probably good,” she says. “Don’t let yourself off the hook so easily.”
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