Jason Reitman and Diablo Cody‘s Tully (Focus, 4.20) is more of a potential awards-bait vehicle for Charlize Theron than a Reitman comeback thing, which is what I was sensing after catching the trailer a couple of weeks ago.
Tully is a better film than Reitman’s disastrously received Labor Day and Men, Women & Children, so it’s an image-burnisher to some degree. But it’s on the slight side.
Cody’s script is amusingly sharp and sardonic, and Theron’s portrayal of Marlo, a stressed suburban mom coping with pregnancy and child care, is her boldest since playing an alcoholic writer in Reitman and Cody’s Young Adult (’11) and her most Raging Bull-ish performance since Monster (’03), lumbering around Tully with her Aileen Wournos bod.
Mackenzie Davis, Charlize Theron in Jason Reitman’s
Tully (Focus, 4.20).
I don’t know if Academy members will be cherishing Tully ten or eleven months from now, but Theron’s performance is angry, open-hearted, prickly, lived-in — an obvious awards-level thing.
Tully is partly a family-unit sitcom and partly a tricky psychological drama. It mostly takes place in a New York-area suburban home occupied by Marlo, her husband Drew (Ron Livingston) and their three kids — a special-needs six year-old boy, a slightly younger girl and a just-born infant.
It’s one of those stories that (a) portrays a problem and then (b) introduces an outsider who not only makes things better but becomes a kind of magic healer. The question is how this agreeable situation will pan out in the long run.
With Drew barely paying attention to the kid-rearing situation, focusing on his job during the day and playing video games at night, pregnant Marlo is exhausted — whipped — by maternal responsibilities. And then the baby arrives and the burden is even more crushing with middle-of-the-night feedings and wailings and whatnot. So Marlo’s rich brother (Mark Duplass) tries to persuade her to accept the gratis services of a night nanny — a younger woman who will drop by in the evening and take care of the baby so that Marlo can get some much-needed shut-eye.