Tully

Synopsis: Marlo (Charlize Theron), a mother of two young children and a newborn hires a night nanny (Mackenzie Davis) to help with this trying time.   

For the first half-hour or so Tully is everything that you would want from director Jason Reitman and writer Diablo Cody who together brought us 2007’s Juno and 2011’s Young Adult. That the star of the latter film, Charlize Theron, also headlines here is the icing and the cherry on the cake of our expectations.

Clearly written from first-hand experience (Cody wrote the script after having a third child of her own) Tully takes us on a mordantly unglamorous ride through the rigours of post-partum motherhood - the  baby’s incessant crying, the sleepless nights, the dirty nappies and the swollen boobs – a time from which some women, and Marlo is one of them, pray for relief.  In addition Marlo’s six-year old son is autistic and her husband (Ron Livingston) is either travelling for work or playing video games in bed before crashing out.  Trying as it is, this purgatorial state of affairs is portrayed with wryly compassionate humour by the team of Cody. Reitman and Theron. .

And then Tully enters the picture and the enjoyment detumesces rapidly never to return. Bubbly, relentlessly positive and supportive to Marlo, we can’t help but register her as too good to be true. She introduces a tone that is so different to the salty cynicism of everything that has gone before that we know there must be some twist coming. And eventually it does, but although in hindsight it’s quite a clever ruse Reitman crunches through it with a remarkable lack of finesse, relying more on editing than narrative development, so much so that some audiences may wonder what happened and when they work it out, feel a little gypped.

Theron is a remarkable actress.  She doesn’t have the mimetic skills of a Meryl Streep but rather, chameleon-like, she seemingly disappears into her character. Here she not only gives an empathetically convincing portrait of a stoically acquiescent woman on the edge of exhaustion but she physically, particularly facially, morphs with Marlo’s moods as they swing from resignation to relief to depression and back again. Monster (2003) remains (and probably always will) her tour de force but she is wonderful here. Opposite her, Mackenzie Davis is fine as a boho-chic Mary Poppins although she doesn’t bring anything to the film to match Theron’s force of presence.

So, Theron fans and a lot of mothers will find much to enjoy with Tully, it’s just a pity that Reitman and Cody didn’t find a more effective way to resolve their worthy story.

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