Recensioni de* critic*

Most directors have seemed to forget [Paul Giamatti] is capable of such sensitive, lived-in acting; here’s hoping he’ll find more collaborators, like Jenkins, who will encourage him to drop the hysterics in favor of this kind of emotional honesty.

Jenkins doesn't devote much time to the couple's past, nor does she have to—the humiliations Richard and Rachel suffer at present speaks to their fall from social significance. Yet the knowledge of their fall informs Private Life, adding metaphorical heft to the primary narrative.

Truer to life, where arguments don’t always land with a conclusive thud, Private Life masterfully seizes on the ebb and flow of decisions and disappointments, cresting in fantastic uncertainty. Jenkins excavates without puncture, but small cuts can cause the most acute pain.

The drama strains to achieve psychological resonance, but the characters’ conflicts, stretched between breezy satire and fiery passion, trace narrow grooves of plausibility; scenes of painful turmoil play like skillful script readings rather than life events.

When the story is told in as engaging and fair-minded a way as it is here by Jenkins—who's as adept with lyrical images as she is with snappy dialogue, and allows us to laugh at the characters even as we feel for them—it's as immersive as any blockbuster, sneakily so. This film is a reminder that the smallness of life can feel huge when we're in the middle of it.

The movie is Jenkins’s first in 10 years (the last one, The Savages, earned her an Oscar nomination). It’s been too long. And in many ways, Private Life does its part to make up for lost time. Jenkins’s talent for everyday doses of acid and irony is here.

If everyone is a little bit ridiculous, nobody is set up to be mocked. The comedy, like the pathos, comes from recognition, and not in a narrowly sociological sense. These are just people, after all.

Jenkins delivers honestly on the stresses and emotions of this situation, most touchingly in Sadie's devotion to her aunt and uncle, which shifts from impulsive generosity to a more dangerous self-sacrifice.

In its meandering, episodic early chapters, which bear mockingly ominous titles like “The Retrieval” and “The Transfer,” Private Life moves like a comedy, going from one joke about the foibles of high-strung Manhattanites to the next. But there’s something, too, about the layouts of book-filled, rent-stabilized apartments that gooses the inherent voyeurism of domestic dramas.

Sometimes harrowing, sometimes hilarious, and always character-based, providing insight into an experience that millions of people share but that’s rarely covered in film.