Inconceivable

Private Life a film by Tamara Jenkins.  With Kathryn Hahn, Paul Giamatti, Molly Shannon, Kayli Carter.  Streaming on Netflix.  *****

I never had a problem getting a woman pregnant.  My problem was not getting a woman pregnant.  So I’ve never known much about couples failing to conceive.  It’s a whole field of medicine these days, and once you go down that rabbit hole there’s no telling when you’ll come up.  Private Life is about two people who go through hell, but it’s a comedy (like Tamara Jenkins’ earlier The Savages, about putting a parent into a nursing home).  If it weren’t a comedy it would be unbearable.  But this is a literate, hilarious movie about two people trying to overcome a common problem.  The barriers they face are beyond belief.

Richard Grimes (Paul Giamatti) runs a small off-Broadway theater.  His wife Rachel (Kathryn Hahn), has written plays and short stories, and is about to come out with a novel.  They are creative types, in other words, living in Manhattan (one of the things I loved was the profusion of books in their apartment, two deep on some shelves.  There are even books on the windowsills).  As such people go they’re successful, which means they’re getting by but not rolling in money.  There’s obviously a substantial back story about how they got where they are, but at least for the time being, they’ve made it (a situation that can vanish in the blink of an eye).  As we discover late in the movie, Rachel put off starting a family because she was trying to get a foothold in her career.  By age 41 she was ready.  And there her problems began.

The situation as the movie opens is way past the point where they’re having sex and hoping something happens.  They’re doing in vitro fertilization, retrieving an egg from Rachel, uniting it with Richard’s sperm, and planting the fertilized egg back in.  But Rachel’s old eggs are tired, at least that’s one theory, and Richard not only has just one testicle[1] (a fact which Rachel mentions at the drop of a hat), but his sperm have somehow become confused; instead of joining his semen at ejaculation, they wander off, where I do not know.  (Dr. Dordick’s explanation of that—note his name, by the way—comparing it to getting Mountain Dew at the movie theater, is a real stunner.  I’m just glad I wasn’t at a movie theater drinking Mountain Dew when I heard it).  Richard’s sperm problem can be addressed, though it will cost another $10,000.  Which they do not have, but Richard can borrow from his periodontist brother Charlie (John Carroll Lynch).  They’ve come this far, so they soldier on.

Charlie is married to Cynthia (Molly Shannon), who is opposed to sinking another ten thousand clams into this project.  In the meantime, she and Charlie have a 25 year old daughter named Sadie who is still trying to get through college, studying creative writing; Richard and Rachel are the only people who have really encouraged her, and she is moving in with them for the summer to intern at Richard’s theater.  Richard and Rachel have decided they need to seek an egg from another donor—another $10,000 down the tubes (pardon the expression)—and instead of choosing a total stranger, they hit on the idea of asking Sadie.  She could use the money; they will know that their egg comes from good stock, so to speak.  It sounds like a good idea at the time.

It was actually a terrible idea; my wife was screaming at them not to do it as they made the decision.[2]  But while it was a terrible and complicating decision for their lives, it was a great decision for the movie, because Sadie (Kayli Carter) is not only adorable, she’s hilarious.  She hasn’t succeeded as a writer, but she really is sincere in wanting to do that (and has just written a short story about an act of fellatio, which Richard, for one, is happy to read).  She’s learned a lot in her God-knows-how-many-years at college.  Here she is, for instance, at breakfast one morning.  “Oh, my God, look at us. We’re like an ad for assholes . . . it’s just that whole… people with cappuccinos in their lofts, with their laptops, dogs, with messy hair. You know, that whole fantasy. It’s not your fault. You guys are authentic and real, you’ve just been co-opted by cultural mechanisms that create desirability. I took a media and consumer society course. It was pretty life-altering.”  (Kayli Carter’s delivery of these lines is superb, but let’s not forget that Tamara Jenkins wrote them.)

So it’s great having her around, even if her decision to help them seems a little facile (“Look, I get my period every month and I flush an egg down the toilet. Why not give some to Richard and Rachel?”), and even if—we see this coming a mile away—she decides to announce her decision to the whole family at Thanksgiving dinner.  She’s a breath of fresh air to the movie just when the whole enterprise was seeming grim and impossible.  The movie doesn’t make light of the struggle.  It’s laughing with Richard and Rachel, not at them.

What they eventually realize is that this quest to have a child by any means—they’re looking into adoption, surrogate mothers, the works—has taken over their lives.  Richard points out the mild irony that, in trying to have a baby, they’ve only had sex once in eleven months.  A crisis involving Sadie puts everything in perspective, and makes them realize they’ve gone too far.

Which doesn’t mean they stop.  The final scenes of this movie, one involving Sadie and one with the two of them, seemed perfect, especially the scene that we watch as the credits roll.  Their problems aren’t over, but they’ve gotten to a new place with them.  And as we are reminded throughout the movie, having children isn’t an unadulterated pleasure (just ask Sadie’s mother).  You get pregnant and you have a whole new set of problems.

Every few weeks the New York Times publishes an article about the fifty best movies on Netflix.  It doesn’t change much from time to time, though I look through it dutifully every time.  I’ve seen probably thirty of their top fifty, and there are some winners in there, including Moonlight and The Florida Project.  But I’m looking for ones I haven’t seen.  This was a great choice.

[1] There’s a joke about that.  A man who has an extraordinary libido goes to a doctor to have it checked out, and the doctor examines him and says, “You have three testicles.”  Rather proud of this fact, the man leaves and goes to a bar.  He sits down beside a young guy, and three guys are across the bar from him.  He says, “I’ll bet you a hundred bucks that, between the two of us, this guy and I have five balls.”  The guys across the bar take the bet.  Rather timidly, the man beside him leans over and says, “I hope you have four.”

[2] You can do that when you’re at home watching Netflix.  Another advantage over watching in the theater.