☆☆☆½
Like a hipster Mary Poppins, maintaining a coy mysteriousness about her age and dressed in the vaguely inappropriate style of a girl who refuses to grow up, Tully almost magically appears in the life of a woman whose life and whose family is in disarray.
Tully (played with ever-smiling sensitivity by Mackenzie Davis) is a "night nanny," whose job is to give the mother of a newborn some much-needed rest through the evening so, in theory, she can be fresher, more alert and more present for her children and her family the next day.
Hiring Tully isn't the first choice of Marlo (Charlize Theron) or her husband Drew (Ron Livingston), but is instead the brainchild, so to speak, of Marlo's wealthy, supercilious brother (Mark Duplass), who sees how exhausted Marlo is before she even gives birth to her third child. This baby is, to use the charitable turn of phrase, unplanned, and with a precocious daughter and apparently autistic son already taking up more time and headspace than she has available, Marlo overcomes her initial reluctance and calls on Tully.
The younger woman shows up in the middle of the night, almost sneaking in to the house and taking over exactly where Marlo leaves off -- gently waking her in the middle of the night when the baby is hungry, and using the rest of her time to get the house in order and open long-closed doors of thought and conversation with Marlo.
It's not long before Marlo is wearing makeup, going jogging and getting her life back, and this is the point that Diablo Cody's witty, endearing script started losing me -- because despite the female-centric storyline that puts Marlo's frustrations, fears and limitations front and center, there's a weird undercurrent of a more troubling message here: Marlo isn't herself because she isn't pretty. It's not just sleep-deprivation and exhaustion that have settled in, it's physical ugliness. In one of the film's many one-liners, Marlo's daughter looks at her mother's stretch marks and sagging belly and expresses disgust.
Yet, once Tully arrives, Marlo has time to be more like herself, hiding her tiredness under makeup (which the film later professes to see as a crutch) and blossoming and beaming when she finally has time to exercise and lose weight -- and worry less about her baby.
Meanwhile, Tully views her videogame-obsessed husband and status-obsessed brother with appropriate disdain, but it started making me wonder: According to Tully, who is a worthy person? It seems only the thin, happy, gentle, well-balanced and impossibly pretty Tully herself is a person to be emulated, and just as this thought started becoming more troublesome in my mind, Tully did something really unexpected that caught me thoroughly off-guard and made me wonder what exactly the movie had been trying to do all along.
At least initially, it doesn't look like even Jason Reitman's confident direction (which includes a very nice eye for place-setting, aided by Eric Steelberg's cinematography) will be able to overcome the quirky storytelling decision that Cody's script takes, especially since such melodramatic, what's-the-meaning-of-it-all silliness ruined Reitman's last film, the genuinely awful Men, Women & Children.
Maybe it's because Charlize Theron is so good -- so honest and sincere, so dry and funny, so willing to take the risks that bring her character surprising depth amid Cody's one-liners -- or maybe it's because the relationship between Marlo and Tully is so fulfilling that Tully overcomes this weird, not-entirely-satisfying turn that had me waffling about whether I liked the movie or whether its last 15 minutes just lost me entirely.
I'm still on the fence about it dramatically, and the too-good-to-be-true Tully herself wears on the nerves a bit with her Earth-Mother patience and encyclopedic knowledge (though Davis is always very good), Tully manages to remain engaging and endearing.
Still, it's interesting to see how screenwriter Cody, whose screenplay for Juno won her an Oscar, doesn't quite have her finger on the way life works for the "little people." Marlo's problems are genuine and overwhelming ones, and the solutions Tully presents often seem just a bit too contrived, especially when Theron works so hard to ground them in an exasperated, resigned reality.
Viewed May 4, 2018 -- ArcLight Sherman Oaks
2020
Tully (played with ever-smiling sensitivity by Mackenzie Davis) is a "night nanny," whose job is to give the mother of a newborn some much-needed rest through the evening so, in theory, she can be fresher, more alert and more present for her children and her family the next day.
Hiring Tully isn't the first choice of Marlo (Charlize Theron) or her husband Drew (Ron Livingston), but is instead the brainchild, so to speak, of Marlo's wealthy, supercilious brother (Mark Duplass), who sees how exhausted Marlo is before she even gives birth to her third child. This baby is, to use the charitable turn of phrase, unplanned, and with a precocious daughter and apparently autistic son already taking up more time and headspace than she has available, Marlo overcomes her initial reluctance and calls on Tully.
The younger woman shows up in the middle of the night, almost sneaking in to the house and taking over exactly where Marlo leaves off -- gently waking her in the middle of the night when the baby is hungry, and using the rest of her time to get the house in order and open long-closed doors of thought and conversation with Marlo.
It's not long before Marlo is wearing makeup, going jogging and getting her life back, and this is the point that Diablo Cody's witty, endearing script started losing me -- because despite the female-centric storyline that puts Marlo's frustrations, fears and limitations front and center, there's a weird undercurrent of a more troubling message here: Marlo isn't herself because she isn't pretty. It's not just sleep-deprivation and exhaustion that have settled in, it's physical ugliness. In one of the film's many one-liners, Marlo's daughter looks at her mother's stretch marks and sagging belly and expresses disgust.
Yet, once Tully arrives, Marlo has time to be more like herself, hiding her tiredness under makeup (which the film later professes to see as a crutch) and blossoming and beaming when she finally has time to exercise and lose weight -- and worry less about her baby.
Meanwhile, Tully views her videogame-obsessed husband and status-obsessed brother with appropriate disdain, but it started making me wonder: According to Tully, who is a worthy person? It seems only the thin, happy, gentle, well-balanced and impossibly pretty Tully herself is a person to be emulated, and just as this thought started becoming more troublesome in my mind, Tully did something really unexpected that caught me thoroughly off-guard and made me wonder what exactly the movie had been trying to do all along.
At least initially, it doesn't look like even Jason Reitman's confident direction (which includes a very nice eye for place-setting, aided by Eric Steelberg's cinematography) will be able to overcome the quirky storytelling decision that Cody's script takes, especially since such melodramatic, what's-the-meaning-of-it-all silliness ruined Reitman's last film, the genuinely awful Men, Women & Children.
Maybe it's because Charlize Theron is so good -- so honest and sincere, so dry and funny, so willing to take the risks that bring her character surprising depth amid Cody's one-liners -- or maybe it's because the relationship between Marlo and Tully is so fulfilling that Tully overcomes this weird, not-entirely-satisfying turn that had me waffling about whether I liked the movie or whether its last 15 minutes just lost me entirely.
I'm still on the fence about it dramatically, and the too-good-to-be-true Tully herself wears on the nerves a bit with her Earth-Mother patience and encyclopedic knowledge (though Davis is always very good), Tully manages to remain engaging and endearing.
Still, it's interesting to see how screenwriter Cody, whose screenplay for Juno won her an Oscar, doesn't quite have her finger on the way life works for the "little people." Marlo's problems are genuine and overwhelming ones, and the solutions Tully presents often seem just a bit too contrived, especially when Theron works so hard to ground them in an exasperated, resigned reality.
Viewed May 4, 2018 -- ArcLight Sherman Oaks
2020
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