Look, there are a number of great things about the Jason Reitman-directed and Diablo Cody-penned Tully, and it’s quite easy to list them off.
Charlize Theron is, as usual, wonderful and brings a grounded weariness to the role of stay-at-home mother Marlo, with two children and a third on the way, who gave up her life in the city as a writer in order to settle down with her husband (Ron Livingston). You can feel the colossal stress and pain behind everything that she does in this film: That she thinks she’s not a good enough mother to her children, especially her special needs child (whom she spends tender moments with doing touch therapy), that she can and has to do everything by herself, as opposed to asking her rich brother (Mark Duplass) for help. She’s still got her normal wit, but it’s dampened by outright exhaustion.
That empathy for the modern mother, also forgotten by so much art and entertainment, is perhaps Tully’s best feature, and it portrays their struggles with a rawness and pain that’s unlike nearly anything seen in the multiplex in recent years. Eric Steelberg’s lush magic-hour cinematography bathes her home in a warm orange light, adding a dreamlike dimension to her environment that’s constantly at odds with the seeming misery of her surroundings, though that changes when a cool night nurse named Tully (Mackenzie Davis) comes a-knocking at her door one night, hired by her sibling to help with the new baby.
This is fertile ground for comedy and for drama, and for a long while, it seems that Cody and Reitman are headed down that path, and the writer especially feels both wizened and like she’s working out a number of kinks in the process. It’s her most autobiographical and personal film by far, especially when you start looking at the comparisons between young Brook Busey and the night nurse. Tully’s the kind of impossibly cool hipster Mary Poppins that a brunch-fantasizing mother would hope for, and her oddities are decently funny enough (like her goofy descriptions of motherhood) that they eventually do become charming.
She’s the kind of person who’s totally in the know about stuff like Ladies and Gentlemen, the Fabulous Stains and has lots of polyamorous relationships, and Marlo becomes kind of enamored with her, both as a person who, you know, cleans her house and bakes cupcakes for the children in her son’s class overnight, and as a person who reminds her of her younger and more free self. She’s accepting of Marlo, as well, letting her know that it’s not wrong to enjoy a crappy reality TV show called Gigalos (a theme of pop culture acceptance that has run in her work from the time she was an Entertainment Weekly columnist and new 90210 stan).
The charm between Davis and Theron is nearly enough to push the film over the quality line, and I wish that it had stayed that way. Unfortunately, Cody has buried within her screenplay an enigma that prevents us from ever getting too close to Davis’s character (which would be fine if she were merely an object of fantasy similar to Poppins), but it stretches the film so far past believability that the earlier realism feels like it’s a part of an entirely different film. It transforms the whole damn thing into a puzzle instead of the character piece that it worked just so hard at being, and it robs the film of a great deal of its power. I won’t offer up any spoilers, but it’s hard not to be deeply disappointed in it. Reitman’s direction, as well, falters once the twist draws near, like a plastic mystery box that breaks apart under the strain of the viewer’s gaze, and he can’t bring these disparate tones together in order to make the final product feel like a cohesive whole.
Tully, like most of the Reitman/Cody collaborations, is already going to be a mixed proposition for a number of audiences, given the utter shittiness of Reitman’s recent oeuvre (Labor Day, Men, Women and Children) and the perception surrounding Cody’s writing — that it’s quip-heavy and emotionally false — by haters who won’t acknowledge that she’s changed as a writer since penning Juno. This film will not convince either of those camps to trust these creators again, but it might offer hope to those who are willing to look past recent history. There are moments in this movie that sing a song of truth and beauty, though they’re undercut by the tragic flaws of the titans behind the camera, and I’d suggest seeing Tully just to witness those.
Featured image via Focus Features.