“All it takes is one good egg.” This refrain is uttered more than a few times throughout the course of Tamara Jenkins’s Private Life, her first feature since 2007’s The Savages. A meditation on marriage, middle age and the haves and have-not’s of fertility, the film stars Kathryn Hahn and Paul Giamatti as an artist couple—she’s a writer, and he runs both a theater group and an artisanal pickle company—desperate to conceive in their 40s. While the pair loads up on IVF hormones and diminishing hopes, they must also make room in their realistically cozy East Village apartment for their […]
by Sarah Salovaara on Sep 17, 2018When Ingmar Bergman wrote the script for his six-part, five-hour miniseries Scenes From a Marriage in 1973, his wife told him that it was far too personal to connect with a wide audience. She was right about its specificity, but wrong about its appeal — when the show premiered on Scandinavian television it was a smash hit, leaving the streets deserted every night that it was on. Bergman re-edited the material into a feature film of around half the length for theatrical distribution in the United States, where it became a hit on the art house circuit on the heels […]
by Jim Hemphill on Sep 14, 2018