Tully a sully on Theron name

UNUSUAL: SOUTH AFRICAN ACTRESS MAKES BIZARRE ROLE CHOICE IN DISAPPOINTING FILM

South Africa’s Charlize Theron has made some highly unusual movie choices in her career – but this one is quite bizarre.

Teaming up again with director Jason Reitman and writer Diablo Cody, Theron portrays Marlo, a harried mom whose brother (Mark Duplass) provides a night nanny named Tully (Mackenzie Davis) to help with her three children and also attend to her needs.

Marlo brings out a darker, more nasty side to anti-natal depression and the overblown, distinctly unglamorous Theron makes a meal of it.

Every aspect of her depressing moods are depicted in great detail, reaching a stage where you, too, feel depressed just watching the movie. This is not a good state of mind to be in.

At its core, Tully is about the experience of motherhood. It not only looks at it in terms of the difficulties and total exhaustion a mother experiences in caring for her infant, but also the psychological landscape involved.

It’s about how a mother feels about herself, about her identity and about her relationship with that place inside that has nothing to do with motherhood, but with her own personal aspiration.

There are faint echoes here of two earlier films involving Cody and Reitman; the award-winning Juno and Young Adult.

In the former, Theron plays a recently divorced but troubled woman who returns to her home in small-town Minnesota, looking to rekindle a romance with her ex-boyfriend, who is happily married with a newborn daughter.

The theme here is the clash between the dreams of youth and the realities of adulthood.

But unlike either of the previous collaborations, Tully doesn’t expand in any direction in its trajectory and feels insulated and hermetically sealed.

The movie opens with Marlo heavily pregnant with her third child. She soon gives birth, and then life becomes very restricted. The baby is always crying, and she is up at all hours breastfeeding. She cannot sleep. She cannot rest. She has no time to herself.

There are also two other children to look after, meals to prepare and a husband who breezes in and out, either to or from the job.

Theron gained an enormous amount of weight to fill out the role, so to speak, and she conveys this feeling of helplessness – until the Tully character materialises and takes over the household, doing an eight-hour shift while Mommy sleeps.

The brother is wealthy and pays for Tully’s services and everything goes gloriously right as Mommy and Tully bond.

Mackenzie Davis, in a nicely pitched performance, gives Tully an aura of benevolent mystery. She’s not just interested in taking care of the child, but of Marlo, too, and she seems to be able to anticipate her needs and desires. At the same time, there is something slightly unsettling about her.

The big problem with Tully is that it never gets anywhere in realistic terms.

It never gets anywhere in realistic terms