Private Life (2018)

  The last scene of Tamara Jenkins’ marvellous film is at once eloquent and taciturn.

Rachel and Richard — by now far less harmoniously matched than their names — sit in a diner. Their Edenic quest ends at Appleby’s. They’re waiting for — we know not whom. It could be another surrogate who has promised to bear a child for them but — as in their earlier experience — now welches out. Or it could be another candidate with an egg transplant. We don’t know which because we’re not told. 

And that’s because it doesn’t matter. All that matters is that this particular couple, despite all the disappointments and discouragements we have watched them brave, persist in their campaign to have a child. We’re not told whether their adoption plan worked out but we assume that either it didn’t or it wasn’t enough. 

Still, that apparently empty last scene is packed. The couple are continuing their fertility quest despite all the discouragements from their friends and from their own experiences. In their faces and deportment we read a tired hope and conviction, barely surviving their disappointments. 

In the one key action, Richard rises from his seat across from Rachel and moves to her side. That is, he remains committed to her desire despite his own weakened resolve for a child and despite their campaign’s cost to their marriage. They constantly argue. They haven’t had sex for a year. Their two surrogate children — massive mastiff dogs — seem marginal to their lives however fully they occupy the space and time. They are two large voids not fillers.

What’s Jenkins’ view of this indomitable resolve? Does it attest to their character or to their destructive obstinance? Who knows? We’re left to our own reading. To our own disposition. The film allows us to project our conclusion. It reads us by how we read it.  

Clearly Jenkins has a clear-eyed view of contemporary feminism — that is, not just the achievement of opportunity for women but its inevitable costs.

Rachel delayed pregnancy until her 40s because she was intent upon establishing her career as a writer. Now she pays the price for that delay — her own eggs having weakened and the couple’s options reduced. 

Rachel’s dilemma is replayed in Richard’s brother’s stepdaughter Sadie. Dropping out of her extended college career, she too wants to become a writer. But her offer to provide Rachel with an effective egg is defeated by her own weakness. When she’s admitted into a respected writers’ retreat she seems destined to repeat Rachel’s success/failure.

We rarely get such a trenchant film focused on a couple in decline. Even in their careers they are fading. Rachel has her new book appearing, but is outraged by its cover’s misrepresentation. She is helpless to protect that offspring too.

Richard has fallen from a successful off-Broadway theatre director to working in a pickle company.  That job, dealing with shrunken phallic emblems, coheres with his having only one testicle and the discovery his semen has no sperm. Fortunately, no-one calls him the shrunken Richard, “Dick.” But their swinging doctor is a Dordick. The couple’s decline coheres with Jenkins’ sense of the limitations of the success of feminism. However liberated, women remain in thrall to their biology.

After all, bearing children — whether, when, where, how, why — that is the most private of life.