Tully

photo courtesy of comingsoon.net

SPOILER-FREE REVIEW

     Charlize Theron stars in Tully, a film about an overworked, exhausted mother who enjoys a breath of fresh air when a night nanny named Tully enters her life. It’s a movie about motherhood, growing up, and the importance of friendship. Directed by Jason Reitman (Juno, Thank You for Smoking), Tully co-stars Mackenzie Davis (The Martian, Blade Runner 2049, Black Mirror’s “San Junipero”) as the unusual night nanny. 

     There aren’t too many movies which explicitly center around motherhood, and nearly none that give it such an unglamorous, unpretentious look. But that’s exactly what Tully does. Theron’s character, Marlo, raises three children largely on her own, with occasional help from a well-meaning but substantively absent father (Ron Livingston). One child is a newborn, and another has a form of autism that makes it difficult for him to fit in at school. It’s a demanding life, and Tully presents that image in full—thanks, in part, to another great performance from Theron.

photo courtesy of metro.co.uk

     Enter Tully. This is a knockout performance from Davis, who makes Tully—an almost angelic, miraculous figure in Marlo’s life—wonderfully magnetic and ever-so peculiar. As Tully integrates herself into the family, she solves many problems, but she also creates some of her own. It’s her complicated presence that sparks Tully’s most thoughtful, interesting moments.

     Tully is a very intimate, personal story; it benefits from a small scope and two strong central characters. And Tully does a masterful job of realizing their lives onscreen. There are a number of moments where the film characterizes Marlo and family in concise, smart little encapsulations that let the audience know, in only a second, exactly what kind of people they are. The movie rounds out their world with a combination of well-crafted montages and well-written dialogue. Dialogue strengthens Davis’s character in particular; she’s at once surprising and believable.

photo courtesy of usatoday.com

     At a certain point, weaknesses in the storytelling make themselves known. The improvement in Marlo’s lot post-Tully is so dramatic and so un-subtle that it ends up being a little on the nose… and it makes it all the easier to predict that things will fall apart. In the third act, an event transpires (an event that I can’t discuss without giving away spoilers) which damages the movie’s emotional impact. The event doesn’t ruin Tully—not by a long shot—but it’s predictable, and the movie’s message would have been stronger without it.

     FINAL VERDICT: It doesn’t quite stick the landing, but Tully is an insightful movie about a relationship between two women in two very specific, very different places in their lives.

Watch the trailer here. 

BEWARE: HERE THERE BE SPOILERS

photo courtesy of popsugar.com

     In Tully’s final scenes, the audience comes to realize that Tully has actually been a figment of Marlo’s imagination. Many of the scenes we’ve witnessed have played out much the same, but without Tully’s corporeal presence. At the risk of being too reductive, it’s a bit like Fight Club—except instead of brooding about masculinity and anarchic societal angst, Tully is about motherhood and learning how to leave the past behind.

     It’s an ambitious twist for a movie with such a small scale, but Tully does the groundwork by sneaking in little hints here and there, often through Davis’s slightly off-kilter performance. The question is: does the twist serve the story, or is it just there for shock value? The revelation that Tully isn’t real certainly does make an impact in terms of character development; it means that Tully’s strength and wisdom are actually Marlo’s, and that Marlo is coming to accept her aging and the loss of some of her dreams.

     But none of those revelations require the twist to have meaning—they could all make sense with a real life Tully, too. Allowing Tully to be real actually gives more meaning to the story: all the ideas about embracing friendship and accepting vulnerability go out the door when Tully becomes intangible. Without any compelling reason to recommend it, the twist feels more like an unnecessary flourish than an insightful ending. Tully would be better served keeping its characters—and, by extension, its stakes—grounded.

photo courtesy of npr.com