Tully

Jason Reitman

Comedies about parenthood invariably fall into one trap or another – they’re too cute, too conventional, too smugly alienating for non-parents and too familiar for those who would rather think about something else. What they rarely seem to be is true and engaging at the same time.

But director Jason Reitman and writer Diablo Cody have a way of making films about women that are real, unvarnished, whip-smart and wonderfully funny. And their latest breaks free of the stultifying stereotypes of its subject matter with an honesty that is quietly ground-breaking.

There is a forward pattern to the pair’s work. Juno was about a preternaturally level-headed 16-year-old who accidentally conceives and goes about planning her child’s adoption. Inversely, Young Adult concerned an emotionally stunted woman in her late thirties, who thought her greatest achievement was being prom queen. And Tully now takes a character into her forties, as she deals with post-natal depression and midlife crisis.

After playing Young Adult’s shockingly behaved anti-heroine, Charlize Theron returns to the Reitman/Cody fold in diametrically different mode as the suffering mother Marlo. As the film opens, the 40-year-old has an eight-year-old daughter and a five-year-old boy, the latter with special needs who’s having trouble at school. With a job in HR, and an over-worked husband, Drew (Ron Livingstone), who leaves most of the parental heavy-lifting to her, she’s already exhausted. And a third is on the way.

Marlo’s coping mechanisms, a fixed smile for the school teachers, a dark sense of humour for her family, appear to work well enough. But her brother Craig (Mark Duplass), notes that the last few years have ‘snuffed a match’ in his sister. And when the new child is born, it’s clear that she’s in the grip of post-natal depression.

Reitman directs a snappy montage that amusingly illustrates the routine of breastfeeding, nappy changing and sleepless nights that are the new mother’s nightmare. Theron, who gamely added around three stone in weight for the role, literally lets it all hang out– both physically and mentally, as Marlo struggles to cope, with no love for herself nor, it would seem, for her newborn.

After weeks of this, she reluctantly takes up her brother’s offer of gifting her a night nanny. In steps Tully (Mackenzie Davis). And everything changes. Not only does this young woman take over at night, minding the child and only waking Marlo for feeding, but she cleans and bakes cupcakes, dispenses zen wisdom and good cheer. And Marlo begins to enjoy life again.

What makes the film continually refreshing is its combination of emotional grit, humour and grounded characterisations. Front and centre is Theron, who is one of Hollywood’s more quietly transformative performers – one moment kicking ass in films like Mad Max and Atomic Blonde, the next unrecognisable as real-life serial killer Aileen Wuornos in Monster (for which she won an Oscar in 2004) and here as a woman who says of herself, “My body looks like a relief map of a war-torn country.”

Importantly, both the writing and the performance are low-key, undemonstrative; Theron doesn’t play a woman crying out for love or attention, but someone who has fallen into the groove of exhausted self-loathing. The result is far more effective than so much needy, cry out loud Hollywood fare.

Likewise, while Tully could be too perfect, too cute, Mackenzie Davis – with her slightly skew-whiff eyes and ferociously direct speech patterns – has an innate strangeness about her that actually counteracts that danger. And her chemistry with Theron is palpable, the pair riffing off each other in a way that prepares the film for its plot surprise in the final stretch.

Whether the film needs this final swerve is a moot point, though it doesn’t suffer for it. The result is the same – a funny, touching, thoughtful, too rare film about women’s experience, which acts too as a testament to having the right people in your life. It speaks volumes that viewers who don’t have children will find the film immensely appealing.