The career of Jason Reitman is an overall successful one, with a filmmaking style that is more competent than unique, and a point of view that only occasionally hits the mark. No one brings the goods out of him the way screenwriter Diablo Cody does. The Oscar-winning writer comes from a perspective that Reitman seems to desperately need. Her humor is sharper, more ingrained in sadness than righteousness, and she has an acceptance of her white privilege that Reitman simply cannot grapple with. More than anything, she seems to have an understanding of normal American people that Reitman doesn’t. Their first two collaborations, Juno and Young Adult, are snappy comedies about women alienated by society and circumstance. In the third leg of their unofficial trilogy, Tully tells another story about an oft-ignored American woman: the tormented, unhappy mother.

This is their second film, after Young Adult, to star Charlize Theron, an actress whose body was chiseled to perfection just last year in Atomic Blonde. She now plays Marlo, a woman who’s body has been bloated by three pregnancies. A mother of two who’s just on the verge of becoming a mother of three, Marlo’s eyes are constantly puffed out, her clothes are stained, ill-fitting and her hair has the hastily-put-together look of someone without enough time in the day. Her husband, Drew (Ron Livingston), is a sturdy but overworked analyst with the kind of complicated job that’s easier to just not explain. Marlo is often left to handle the children alone, which is made even more difficult because one of their children seems riddled with undiagnosed anxiety which causes him to be antsy at best and absolutely unable to deal with outside world at worst. This leaves his placement in a high-level private school in a tenuous position.

After their third child is born, Marlo’s affluent brother, Craig (Mark Duplass) offers to pay for a night nanny to help out in those first, arduous, sleepless months of newborn parenthood. She at first dismisses the idea as another example of Craig’s newfound bourgeoisie lifestyle, but changes her mind when becoming a mother of three begins to lead her to the brink of a breakdown. What arrives is Tully (Makenzie Davis), a surprisingly hip, sexy twenty-six year-old in a crop-top and skinny jeans who finds an immediate comfort with Marlo’s home and newborn infant. Tully’s arrival at first sets Marlo ill at ease, but when the arrangement begins to turn results in Marlo’s life, a dependence grows, and Marlo finally seems to be getting the help she desperately needs.

Tully’s duties seem to go beyond whatever a night nanny is supposed to be. She takes it upon herself to clean the kitchen, prepare baked goods and even help Marlo with her cruise-control marriage, which has fallen into a stasis as Marlo and Drew struggle to create passion in their crowded schedule. Most importantly, Tully gives Marlo someone to talk to. Presented with someone who so closely mirrors herself in her twenties, Marlo is given something like a fountain of youth as well as a full night’s sleep. From the start, there’s an aspect of Tully’s job that seems to good to be true, and the audience knows that there is more to this peppy twenty-something than the film wants to share. It’s not worth revealing here, but needless to say, Cody’s script is remarkably clever and desperately melancholy when the other shoe drops.

Reitman’s filmmaking – always solid, seldom exceptional – seems energized in Tully, properly displaying the rising levels of tension and anxiety as Marlo’s existence is spread unbelievably thin by the demands of motherhood, the pressures of living up to past hopes and the cruel bureaucracy of private school politics. The movie is filled with a rush of montages (the film is edited by Stefan Grube) that showcase the hardship of parenting without losing any of Cody’s humor in how unfair life’s little indignities can be. Like Young Adult, Reitman obsesses over Theron’s physical presence and how it reflects off of others. Her obvious beauty is nothing in the face of parenting’s constant demands which inherently asks her to sacrifice what she once looked like. Both Reitman and Theron wordlessly express how painful that sacrifice is; a sacrifice often dismissed as vanity.

Tully could be mistaken as one of those movies that defames parenthood as needlessly dream-crushing and soul-sucking, but it isn’t. It finds no problems with the sacrifices that parents make for their children, but instead becomes something different: a movie about growing up. Cody is more interested in how Marlo responds to getting older than how she behaves as a parent. The film examines the moment when youth is officially swept away, incapable of being reclaimed; when your innocence is transferred to your own children and all your left with is the cold reality of life. Tully isn’t as spry and charming as Juno, nor is it as bleakly cynical as Young Adult. It sits in between: mature yet uncertain, chaotic yet wise. It understands that problems simply change with age, not decrease, and it still manages to have a sense of humor about it

 

Directed by Jason Reitman