Some of Jenkins' humor pushes right to the edge of farce without tipping over, as when Richard justifiably blows up at a doctor's unprofessional behavior, then realizes he's overdoing it and making a spectacle of himself. (Nobody does righteous snits better than Giamatti.) Other times, the film digs into the minutia of marriage and family life with the surgical precision of Mike Leigh, capturing fleeting images and moments that sum up an experience. The personalty test that Sadie takes in order to be cleared as a surrogate includes statements which, viewed in tight close-up, seem nearly poetic in their strangeness ("Evil spirits possess me at times." "I would like to become a singer."). A quick iris-to-black as Rachel succumbs to anesthesia, followed by a blurry shot from her point-of-view as she wakes up and sees a package of animal crackers and a bottle of apple juice on a meal tray, sum up the dreamlike feeling of suspension that accrues when you spend a lot of time in doctor's offices, hospitals, and operating rooms, with their blank walls and identically uniformed employees. (Hahn, who's on a roll these days, is at the top of her game, handling Jenkins' barbed dialogue and the story's many reactive closeups with equal skill.)

The dialogue, especially between Rachel and Richard, is just as astute. We see what drew them together (a shared love of creativity plus undeniable comic chemistry) as well as the despair that they hide from each other for fear of making a tense partnership unpleasant. Each sometimes feels that their failure to conceive is the other's fault, and Jenkins weaves social messaging into their reasons for waiting, acknowledging it as a factor without telling us if she thinks they made good or bad decisions. Richard stings Rachel by suggesting that she's assigning blame for their situation onto the mixed messages she received about family and career back in college. "You can't blame second wave feminism for our ambivalence about having a kid!" he groans. To the film's credit, neither is portrayed as being entirely wrong. 

The movie also succeeds as a portrait of a particular urban lifestyle—creative people living beyond their means because they don't want to give up youthful dreams of the big city—as well as the larger forces that conspire to make their existence precarious and unrealistic. The Lower East Side New York neighborhood where Rachel and Richard have lived for decades has become almost entirely gentrified (except for their block, which Sadie says is "very 'Serpico'). The site of Richard's old theater company is a bank branch. Condos are springing up everywhere, promising a tourist-like experience of a city that no longer exists.  

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