NEW YORK — Tamara Jenkins has had time to consider why there have been such long stretches between her movies. Her latest, “Private Life,” starring Kathryn Hahn and Paul Giamatti as a New York couple struggling with infertility treatments, comes 11 years after her last one, the Oscar-nominated “The Savages.”
For Jenkins’ fans, such prolonged absences are a disappointment. For others, it’s a prime example of how the movie industry doesn’t value its female filmmakers like its male ones. For Jenkins, it’s more complicated.
She and her husband, Jim Taylor, had a kid in that time period — the experience of which eventually led her to writing “Private Life.” And then she’s meticulous in her writing process; she estimates it took two years to write “Private Life,” some of that time spent at the upstate New York artists’ colony Yadoo.
“It’s also a desire to not necessarily make any old thing. There are a lot of things out there that might be makeable but aren’t good. There are a lot of really bad movies,” Jenkins said in a recent interview. “And I never have had an easy time trying to get these things made. Like ‘The Savages,’ which took place in a nursing home, nobody wants to make that movie. This is different but, still, it doesn’t sound sexy on paper.”
“Private Life,” which premiered on Netflix and in select theaters Friday, is indeed more than its synopsis. Hahn and Giamatti play downtown New York creatives reaching middle age and going through one fertility trial after another. But in Jenkins’ hands, “Private Life” is a caustically funny, painfully intimate, medicalized examination of, as she says, “a marriage in the middle.” Though much of the plot follows a struggle to conceive, it’s ultimately centered on the couple; Giamatti compares it to “Waiting for Godot.”
“People ask me what it’s about and I say it’s a movie about marriage,” Jenkins said. “It’s obviously on a very specific journey that they’re on. But there was something so existential about that problem for them. It’s so primal.”
As an on-screen couple, Hahn and Giamatti are remarkably attuned to each other, especially considering they didn’t know each other before the film. Jenkins set up a meeting at Giamatti’s Brooklyn home for the two to meet and get acquainted.
“I feel something about this movie that I don’t feel about many things I’ve been in. I really love it, and a lot of it is those two women I got to work with,” Giamatti said by phone.
Jenkins, 56, has regularly turned pieces from her life into her films. “The Slums of Beverly Hills,” about a transient, lower-middle class Jewish family in Beverly Hills, was inspired by her own 1970s youth. “The Savages,” which starred Laura Linney (she was Oscar nominated, as was Jenkins’ script) and Philip Seymour Hoffman, chronicled two siblings dealing with an elderly parent with dementia. It too was partly autobiographical.
