Netflix’s ‘Private Life’ Gives Kathryn Hahn the Best Role She’s Ever Had

WEEKEND WATCH is here for you. Every Friday we’re going to recommend the best of what’s new to rent on VOD or stream for free. It’s your weekend; allow us to make it better. Check out all of our Weekend Watch recommendations here.

What to Stream This Weekend

MOVIE: Private Life
DIRECTOR: Tamara Jenkins
CAST: Kathryn Hahn, Paul Giamatti, Kayli Carter, Molly Shannon, John Carroll Lynch
AVAILABLE ON: Netflix

The filmmaker Tamara Jenkins has made three films in her 20-year directorial career, and each one of them resists easy classification. Which might be a big part of the reason why she’s only made three films in twenty years. 1998’s Slums of Beverly Hills launched Natasha Lyonne’s career as a nonplussed teenager trying to figure out her youth as her bum of a dad (Alan Arkin) moves the family into a motel on the outskirts of posh Beverly Hills. It’s a comedy, but it’s dark and not really all that fun, but it’s satisfying. 2007’s The Savages is about adult siblings played by Philip Seymour Hoffman and Laura Linney dealing with the decline and eventual death of their not-that-great father. The film is more morose than it is funny, but it has its moments, and Linney’s surprise Oscar nomination was richly deserved. The arrival of Private Life, now 11 years removed from her last film, is a cause to celebrate, and yet it’s been hard to know just how to anticipate this movie, as we still have no idea how to anticipate Jenkins’s work.

Here’s the easy part: once again, a Tamara Jenkins movie gives a phenomenally talented actress the chance to bite into a part that’s rich, complicated, and (one imagines) a challenge to pull off. Kathryn Hahn has been one of our best actresses, in TV and in movies, for years now, but Private Life puts her in another ballpark altogether. Hahn and Paul Giamatti play Rachel and Richard, a married couple, writers, clinging to their life in the East Village of New York and trying like hell to have a baby. Emphasis on hell, actually. The film opens with Richard stabbing Rachel in the ass with a needle full of hormones, and the agonizing processes and demoralizing failures just keep going from there. As does the money, by the thousands, out of their bank account. You’ve likely heard of what a nightmare infertility can be for a couple looking to conceive, but Private Life puts you right down in the foxhole with these two. With every bad test result and failed procedure and dead-end adoption avenue, it’s like watching a couple endure emotional warfare; sometimes they’re on the same side, and sometimes they’re not. At their wits end, after being told that Rachel’s eggs are not viable, is to turn to an egg donor. Which is right when their step-niece — Richard’s brother’s step-daughter, Sadie, played by Kayli Carter — emerges in their lives.

Once Sadie enters the story, it feels like we’re on familiar ground with the movie. She’s in her mid-20s, adrift among her big ambitions (she’d love to be a writer and looks up to Rachel especially); a flake with a good heart and an adventurous spirit, which is pretty much exactly what Richard and Rachel are looking for. The trio’s dynamic is endearing; Richard and Rachel are the artistic, nurturing, “cool” parents she’s never had (Molly Shannon, playing Sadie’s mother, presents a caustic contrast). Conception has been hell thus far, but now’s the part in the movie with the funny morning sickness and the lamaze classes and Juno shouting “Thundercats goooooooooo!” to her loveable dad… right? Not quite. Private Life, which was inspired at least in part by Jenkins’ own experiences with fertility treatments, is less rosy and a bit more wise than that.

Rachel sees Sadie as her great hope, yes, and their relationship in particular is really fascinating, with intertwined strands of mentorship and love and need. But things don’t go smoothly, and you watch it just devastate Rachel. Hahn and Giamatti — looking as bedraggled as they ever have on screen — really get to dig into what a struggle like this does to a marriage. How it makes them teammates and co-conspirators while at the same time throwing countless wedges in between them.

If this all sounds like a major bummer, here’s where I should add that, while not filled with belly laughs, there’s a great, weary sense of humor to the film. These are good, smart, fun people, and you trust Jenkins not to just put them through the wringer for no reason. Private Life, like all of Jenkins’s movies, defies easy categorization. It’s a little funny, a little sad, a little serious, a little hopeful. It is, at its best, so warmly, recognizably human, with some great performances. It’s adult indie drama done at its highest level.

Stream Private Life on Netflix