Summary
The mumblecore Mary Poppins? A curious blend of reality and quirkiness doesn’t give any easy answers, but is held together by fierce performances.
The collaborations between director Jason Reitman and writer Diablo Cody have all looked at the intersection between expectation and reality. From their first joint effort of Juno (2007), it was the pressures of adults placed on a teen facing an unexpected pregnancy. TULLY is at the other end of the scale, where the promise of youth has given way to apathy.
Marlo (Charlize Theron), struggling to keep up with the demands of her two children, is heavily pregnant with a third. Her wealthy brother Craig wants to pay for a night nanny, which Marlo refuses – at least until exhaustion pushes her to the bring of a breakdown. The titular Tully (Mackenzie Davis) arrives with a flurry of energy, and begins to transform Marlo’s life.
TULLY is Cody’s most balanced script since Young Adult. Just as that earlier film superficially spoke to a generation stuck in their pop cultural past, this latest film looks at a different kind of early mid-life crisis. Marlo finds in Tully a series of sparks and parallels to her own lost youth, as she enters Marlo’s life like some kind of mumblecore Mary Poppins. “I’m like Saudi Arabia,” she explains. “I have an energy surplus.”
Of course, some of Cody’s more self-conscious quirks from her oeuvre are still evident in these lines. Having moved on from lampooning a certain millennial speech pattern, it’s never entirely clear if she and Reitman are mocking the pretentiously rich or offering them up as a better alternative to Marlo’s lifelong denial of self.
At times, it seems like we are being presented with a series of happenings and quick fixes to her life, and some of these interactions occasionally test the bounds of believability. There’s a sequence in which Tully helps Marlo’s husband Drew (Ron Livingston) live out a waitress fantasy, and Marlo seems to just go with it quite easily. It’s a hint of things to come, but scenes such as this take us out of the moment.
What keeps us captivated are the performances of Davis and the physically transformed Theron. The actor reportedly gained 50 pounds (~23kg), and is one of her most metamorphic roles since 2003’s Monster. “My body looks like the relief map for a war-torn country,” she quips at one point in the film. Similarly, Davis (Black Mirror, Blade Runner 2049) helps viewers stay on board once the film swerves off the road, much in the same way her character assists Marlo.
Like Young Adult, Cody and Reitman don’t come to a necessarily satisfying or realistic conclusion. “All we do is converse,” one of the characters knowingly suggests, “like the people in a Spanish textbook.” It’s never a tough examination of mental health issues, but perhaps the film will serve some viewers as a means of getting them through their own tough times.
