Tully and the paradox of motherhood
Does being a mom fundamentally change a woman?
Attention: Spoilers ahead. “You pretty much are the baby right now,” says Tully, the night nanny (Mackenzie Davis) for whom the recently released feature film is named. Impossibly young and thin, she has a surplus of energy as she plays opposite Charlize Theron’s character Marlo, an exhausted 40-something woman who has just given birth to her third baby.
Marlo’s much more substantial postpartum frame (Theron reportedly gained 50 pounds for the role) represents bodies seldom seen on film but recognized by most women: Bodies that have swollen and stretched and now sag; bodies that have a troubling tendency to leak blood and milk and other fluids; bodies that play host organism, to varying degrees, to other bodies. As she coos over Marlo’s newborn, Tully points out that the baby’s cells are still circulating through Marlo’s body, and will do so for years, an observation that, depending on one’s frame of mind, can sound beautiful and intimately tender, or terrifying: An intrusion; a takeover. You pretty much are the baby right now. The baby has erased you.
Paradox is at the heart of motherhood, and of Tully, too: Is the mother an individual, or is she not? Is the woman who becomes a mother the same woman she was before, or is she different? Is the woman whose body carries and feeds children all day the same woman who climbs astride her husband at night? Is motherhood beautiful and transcendent, or is it earthy, repulsive and terrifying ? Is the mother solid or liquid, a creature of land or a creature of the water? The film explores these questions with a frankness seldom seen in the mommy-Instagram scene. There is that mother-baby enmeshment at the cellular level, but also at the level of experience: What adult has not, in the full catastrophe of life with children, wondered something like where did “I” go?
Tully is disturbing, but not primarily because it appears to portray postpartum psychosis. That may be, though, notably, Marlo is not given a diagnosis at the film’s end. Rather, it seems that mental illness is a vehicle for pointing to this complicated perception that, through motherhood, one’s self is attenuated even as it is enlarged: You are not quite who you were, you are not quite the baby ( but not quite detachable from the baby, either), and you are somehow not even quite who you are. Tully is disturbing because of its vivid evocation of just what a difficult and trippy road motherhood can be: The kind of experience that makes nearly everyone question her sanity and fitness for the task.
And also question those who seem unruffled by it, perhaps because they have the financial resources to outsource those aspects of parenthood that aren’t pure sunlight and grace, like in the case of Marlo’s impossibly
Tully is a provocation, unsettling what we think we know and bringing our deepest anxieties to the surface.
rich and snooty sister-in-law Elyse (Elaine Tan), whose children eat truffle mac and cheese in another part of their house under the care of a nanny with a master’s degree in child development. She and Marlo’s brother raise the idea of “gifting ” Marlo with a night nanny in the first place.
Marlo’s husband worries that his much wealthier brother-inlaw will lord it over them if they accept the offer of help, and Marlo herself flinches a little at the idea of someone else taking over what is, of course, one of the hardest aspects of newborn care. Another paradox, one perhaps unique to the modern, western, middle-class mother: We manifestly cannot do it all, and feel damned when we cannot and damned if we need help. We are expected not to need anyone and be everything to everyone — including our own comfort and saviour. Children are like barnacles, Marlo says, over a stiff drink. Well, counters Tully, barnacles are obligate parasites — creatures that cannot live without a host, much like infants — and they destroy boats but are harmless to whales. Her question for Marlo: Which are you: Boat or whale? Some women are consumed by motherhood, destroyed by it. The film doesn’t flinch from this grim reality, or from the economic burdens, sociological patterns, and cultural expectations that create conditions in which mothers might find themselves either foundering or floating.
To Tully ’s question — will Marlo turn out to be more like a boat or more like a whale? — the film gives no definite answer. Tully is a provocation, unsettling what we think we know and bringing our deepest anxieties to the surface.