The title of Private Life<\/em><\/strong>, starring Paul Giamatti and Kathryn Hahn as an upscale Manhattan couple trying to have a baby, is ironic. There are fertility issues for both of them \u2014 he\u2019s 47; she\u2019s 41 (they’re both four years older than that in real life) \u2014 so they\u2019re trying IVF, adoption, surrogates, the whole nine yards. Whatever it takes to put a baby into their lives, \u201cshort of kidnapping.\u201d As anyone who has been through this intimate process knows, it is the very opposite of “private.”<\/p>\n Written and directed by Tamara Jenkins (The Savages<\/em>, Slums of Beverly Hills<\/em>), this is seldom an all-out comedy, though it does have droll moments and scenes, particularly when the sophisticated air is punctured by a well-placed vulgarity from Hahn, who\u2019s on the receiving end of what can often be a dehumanizing process of injections and inspections. Jenkins sprawls the film out over 124 minutes, taking us through the many, many avenues a marginally fertile couple might explore, including flashbacks to things they already tried.<\/p>\n It\u2019s somewhat exhausting, which is part of the point; imagine how they feel! It runs long, too, with a pace that is somewhere between \u201cleisurely\u201d and \u201cindulgent,\u201d and the atmosphere \u2014 the main characters and all of their associates are urbane, theater-referencing, well-educated people who claim to have money problems but don\u2019t really \u2014 can be stifling. But Jenkins and the talented cast (also including Molly Shannon, Denis O\u2019Hare, Kayli Carter, and John Carroll Lynch) show deep compassion for these issues, so much that I suspect the film will be cathartic for viewers who relate to them. And Hahn, a comedy dynamo, gives a deeply felt dramatic performance that adds another layer to my esteem for her.<\/p>\n The title of Private Life, starring Paul Giamatti and Kathryn Hahn as an upscale Manhattan couple trying to have a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":92,"featured_media":10369,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1381,340],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10368","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-movies","category-movie-reviews"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10368","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/92"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10368"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10368\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/10369"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10368"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10368"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10368"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}Grade: B<\/span><\/h3>\n
2 hrs., 4 min.; rated R for\u00a0strong sexual content, some graphic nudity, and language<\/em><\/h5>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"