Private Life

  This wonderful, intense domestic drama has topics, conversations, relationships perhaps never shown before in American cinema. As it traces a fractious couple’s arguments and struggles trying to get a baby, it provides rare insights into tensions in a marriage and in its larger community.

  The couple’s dilemma is embodied in gynaecologist Dr. Dordick: Will the conception be by doctor or dick? The latter having failed, a range of alternatives are suggested, rejected, then tried, then lost. (Happily, the film is far too sensitive and tasteful ever to stoop to that level of vulgarity or silliness.) 

Professionally as well as conceptually, the couple have been disappointed in their lives. They live in a small flat in a pre-gentrified NYC neighbourhood. 

Richard (Dick, for long) was a brilliant off-Broadway theatre director until his company expired. Now he sells pickles in a market. He keeps an old Village Voice rave review at hand. (He has only one testicle.) 

Rachel is a writer between books, long obsessed with having a child. This is American brilliance, defeated. The intellectually rich, down at its heels and its mouth. 

And yet they end up representing American entitlement.  For all their inabilities, failures and disappointments, the couple persists unbowed in their quest for parenthood. They feel entitled to become parents, no matter their limitations, their failures.

Indeed, that quest seems to have become their only bond. Their quarrels and their compromises circle around that subject. They seem to have no other connections. They’ve had sex only once in the last year. They alternately erupt, then retreat. 

That obsession makes this modest couple a possible personification of American exceptionalism. This makes the intimate family drama a microcosm of America. Its confidence sapped, its limitations overwhelming, its promised solutions futile and illusory, it stumbles along in dream after dream, defeat after defeat, unable to acknowledge and to accept that some successes are simply not theirs to have. Their deluded quest for their Eden leaves them suspended at Appleby’s.