Dominic Green

Imagine Quentin Tarantino with a conscience, or even a historical consciousness. It’s easy if you try, as a rich junkie once sang, even if Tarantino never bothered to remove the quotation marks from every scene, as if life was all reference and no reality. Then imagine the film noir, that moral grisaille of the Thirties where everything comes in shades of gray, pulled into the technicolour Sixties, so that the fabrics are bright but the morals are polarised into good and evil, black and white, with darkness all around, and above us only sky.

Of the making of babies, there is no end, except for the parents who cannot get started at all. Like the servants of yesteryear, infertile couples are the watchers at the feast of middle-class family life, attending the festivities without getting a seat at the table or a place in posterity. Written and directed by Tamara Jenkins, Private Life, a Netflix film with a limited cinema release, is a sad and subtle comedy of the modern manners of conception. Which is to say, Private Life is about an expensive medico-ethical tragedy in the making, and a film very much worth seeking out on any size of screen, because its implications go to the core of us, as people and as a society.

As an immigrant to this blessed land — 13 years before the mast — I was spared first-hand experience of the Clarence Thomas nomination and the Starr Report. These events were mediated for me by the BBC. That might not sound appetising to anyone but the most coastal of liberals, but I could at least switch it off. Now, I experience American news like Americans do, and like Malcolm McDowell does in A Clockwork Orange, when they pin his eyelids open for re-education. I watched and listened to the entirety of Thursday’s hearing, sustained only by horrified fascination and a giant bag of Trader Joe’s Nacho Cheese Tortilla Chips, the kind of wholesome sustenance that you can only get in this country, God bless it. And what a re-education it was.

We are told that we have lost the ability to hold two thoughts in our minds at the same time. The truth about the explosion of America’s favourite blended family, the Mia Farrow ménage, requires us to recognise several thoughts at once. They boil down to three thoughts. That’s still a lot to think about at the same time, but at least all three are, unlike Mia Farrow and Woody Allen, mutually compatible: Mia Farrow was not a fit parent. Woody Allen is a creep. Ronan Farrow is a hypocrite. Another truism which isn’t entirely true holds that people who believe everything end up believing in nothing. This is not the case here.