MOST FEARLESS

YOU could say that Tully is a familiar comedydrama about a stressedout mom in her forties who, after her third child, finds physical support and emotional solace in the company of a 26-yearold child-care aide.

There’s the trope of the disengaged dad (a warm and shaggy Ron Livingston) and even a sight gag about stepping on stray Legos, barefoot.

But that synopsis doesn’t begin to capture the cinematic sleight-of-hand by which this third collaboration between director Jason Reitman and screenwriter Diablo Cody (Juno, Young Adult) transforms itself from a gardenvariety tale of harried parenthood into something stranger, more honest and even magical.

How it accomplishes that trick involves one of filmdom’s great bits of storytelling trickery.

But that it does so, and in the service of a narrative that is at once prosaic in its specificity and marvellously poetic, should be celebrated.

Charlize Theron, never better, plays Marlo, an expectant mother of two young children who, after her second child is kicked out of school because the staff are unable to accommodate the youngster’s “quirks”, decides to hire a night nanny to help care for her newborn.

Enter Tully (Mackenzie

Davis), the almost impossibly wise, sexy, weird and slightly wild factotum who shows up and quickly becomes not just the hired help but Marlo’s best friend and confidante.

Laid-back yet eager to please, Tully makes for a wondrously level-headed and insightful foil to Theron’s middle-aged mother, offering Marlo not just a sounding board for her anxieties about ageing and inadequacy, but a devil’s advocate.

Tully prods Marlo to reconnect with some part of herself that she believes she has lost. Under Tully’s care, she begins to burn a little bit brighter again.

Maybe too bright. Things come to a head one night when the relationship between Marlo and Tully, who seem to have developed some sort of symbiotic connection, crosses the line between the professional and, well, the reckless.

Relax. This is no horror film about a psychotic babysitter.

But the dynamic between these two women suddenly shifts, dramatically.

At the same time, Reitman and Cody maintain a firm grip, guiding their story off-road not because they’re lost, but because that’s where they want to take us.

The choice is a bold and thrilling one, and it mostly works like a dream. – Washington Post