Jason Reitman’s typically unbearable filmography has been buoyed twice by Diablo Cody’s deceptively simple writing, which smuggles in biting critiques under the guise of simplistic comedy. Juno flipped the script on abortion stereotypes, suggesting that the choice to keep a baby could be made as flippantly and immaturely as pro-life advocates say that abortion decisions are made. Its heroine’s twee argot was gradually revealed to be a smokescreen to mask her anxiety of being placed into an adult situation too soon. Young Adult acted as that film’s inverse, presenting a protagonist who adopted a cold cynicism so early in life that it left her hollow and incapable of feeling joy as she approached middle age.
Tully, the duo’s latest collaboration, initially sets up a similarly two-dimensional façade. Marlo (Charlize Theron), a mom of two young children with a third due any day now, is introduced via the repetitive but nonetheless chaotic routine of child-rearing. On maternity leave, Marlo lacks even the outlet of work to give her a break from the constant grind of domestic responsibility, and montages reduce her days to cacophonous routines punctuated by the odd outburst of her young son, Jonah (Asher Miles Fallica), who is heavily and reductively suggested to be on the spectrum. When she has her new daughter, Marlo is stretched even further, and the montages grow deafening with the shrieks of a newborn infant. This cavalcade of maternal misery is balanced by equally simplistic sketches of supporting players, from Marlo’s video-game-playing husband, Drew (Ron Livingston), to her wealthy brother (Mark Duplass) and sister-in-law (Elaine Tam), whose domestic tranquility and magazine-ready home are a testament to their ability to pay others to handle the actual stresses of housekeeping and child-raising.
Yet Marlo herself is never as breezily established as the context of her life. Where the other adults come across as caricatures, Marlo is complex and insoluble, neither a cynical, world-weary mom sick of her kids nor a selfless domestic goddess who suffers indignities without comment. Unlike the leads in the other Reitman/Cody films, Marlo does not hide from her reality, and is, in fact, often the only one around her willing to face it head on. When the principal of Jonah’s private school, for example, keeps nervously referring to his “quirkiness” as proof he perhaps belongs in a different school, Marlo demands the woman stop euphemizing her child.
There is also Theron’s weight gain for the role, which is less important than how perceptively she carries that weight; Marlo moves with deliberation, marching determinedly through each day’s chores. When she finally gets a brief moment’s pause, however, her skeleton seems to dissolve, leaving a slackening pile of flesh that sinks into exhaustion, tensing up again when confronted with an old friend or even just a passing young woman with all her parts still in the right place, which always triggers a pang of envy. And in spite of her stress, Marlo at first refuses her brother’s offer to pay for a “night nanny” to babysit in the wee hours because she does not feel comfortable handing off responsibility for her child onto someone else.
That resolve eventually crumbles in the face of constant pressure, and one night Marlo answers the doorbell to be greeted by Tully (Mackenzie Davis), who barely pauses to introduce herself before walking in and heading toward the baby as if Marlo were the sitter being relieved rather than the baffled mother. If Theron projects stress and effort, Davis lends Tully an eerie level of premature wisdom and an even more unsettling calm. Tully speaks like a philosophical scientist, peppering her speech with enough facts about child development to give some impression of expertise while mostly talking in abstract terms mixed with, hilariously, life advice doled out to a woman twice her age. Davis’ eager but oddly detached lines compound her alien nature.
Nonetheless, Tully soon proves her worth, knowing just how to calm the infant and cleaning the house of years of collected dust and grime. Her presence, unseen to all but Marlo, brightens the home and rejuvenates the mother, who begins cooking real meals and exercising. Marlo, seen isolated from others by being confined to her children’s lives, suddenly has a friend, and the two form a symbiotic bond in which each comes to rely a bit too much on the other for validation and guidance.
This sets up a film that poses questions about female friendship and the balance of maternal duty with self-actualization, but the final act of Tully squanders this promise, pivoting toward a conclusion that confronts male laziness in the act of child-rearing all for the sake of some easy jokes. This is a worthy topic, of course, but it comes after the film started to shed its comedic overtones to get at its characters’ frustrations and desires, so the return to laugh-chasing, at the expense of Drew’s hapless detachment from his own parental responsibilities is stark. The bait-and-switch of Cody’s other scripts for Reitman returns, albeit trading character growth for narrative redirection predicated on some twists so thoroughly hackneyed that the film abruptly loses all sense of direction. This shift even reorients the more rewarding earlier scenes, recalibrating Theron and Davis’ vulnerable, magnetic energy as nothing more than signposts of a locked narrative that reduces the actresses’ complexity into a tidy plot device. Theron and Davis still retain enough of their insightful approaches to these characters to salvage things, but here is a case of Cody flipping her usual dynamic in the worst way, simplifying rather than deepening her intriguing characters.
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