Witty look at motherhood
Theron gained 20kg for role as battling, pregnant mom
its premise – “I know you think this is some bougie thing that only rich a ****** s do,” Craig says, after passing on Tully’s details.
Theron, who gained nearly 20kg for the role, makes the fine detail of Marlo’s struggle so frazzlingly plausible that only a ghoul would begrudge her the help.
And what help. Despite Marlo’s early misgivings, Tully turns out to be something of a millennial Mar y Poppins: whip-thin, wide-eyed, unnervingly earnest, and capable of soothing squalling infants with preternatural ease.
She arrives while a trashy late-night reality show about gigolos blares from the television, and there is an unspoken suggestion that she, too, is providing a clandestine personal service.
The Fatal Attraction-esque overtones of a lithe young woman insinuating herself into a married couple’s life are toyed with so slyly that it’s hard to tell what kind of film you’re watching, beyond an intriguing one.
Tully is Reitman’s third collaboration with screenwriter Diablo Cody since 2007’s Juno, and their second after 2011’s superb Young Adult to star Theron.
There is real, nerve-jangling fun to be had in watching the various cheering but also boundary-infringing ways in which Tully’s presence restores sanity, and then even joy, to Marlo’s life.
She and Drew are also parents to a mature and independently minded eight-year-old girl (Maddie Dixon-Poirier) and a kindergarten-aged boy (Asher Miles Fallica) whom friends and teachers have politely diagnosed as “quirky”.
That running joke is par for the course in Cody’s script, which in its best moments deliver both a paper cut and the lemon juice to make it worse in a single sharply turned line or exchange. (When a late-night conversation with Tully turns to Marlo’s sex life, she describes her postpartum body as looking like “a relief map of a war-torn country”.)
Yet as more information about Tully’s background creeps into the light, you realise a very bad decision has been made: In order to be “clever” the film sweeps away all of its hard-earned smartness, and the previously gripping uncertainty around the exact nature of Marlo and Tully’s connection is tidied up in a way that feels jarringly cheap.
Tully’s aim was obviously never thus, but you can’t help but wish the film had boldly ridden out its ambiguities Donnie Darko-style, because when it pins down the exact point it wants to make, it immediately feels like a smaller, less insightful picture.
Approach in cinemas with that proviso in mind, and you’ll at least be ably to enjoy a terrific Theron performance and some spikily well-observed mothering humour.