NANNY DOES KNOW BEST!
Charlize Theron weighs in with a winning turn as a struggling mum delivered from despair by a modern Mary Poppins
Tully is the film for which, as you may have read, the willowy Charlize Theron piled on 3st.
Apparently, she routinely set her alarm so she could trough macaroni cheese at 2am, which seems a bit extreme, and reminded me of laurence Olivier’s famous quip when he heard that Dustin Hoffman had been depriving himself of sleep in preparation for a scene in the 1976 film Marathon Man: ‘My dear boy, why don’t you try acting?’
When I saw Tully, however, my scepticism vanished as quickly as the cream puffs in her fridge. It’s true that even a somewhat flabby Charlize Theron is still what most sentient beings would call beautiful, and that Hollywood on the one hand, and the real world on the other, have two quite different notions of what constitutes seriously out of shape.
But if her weight gain helped her to produce this wonderfully engaging performance, at the heart of Jason Reitman’s funny, well-observed, sharply-scripted and thought-provoking film, then more power to her. She is clearly made of stern stuff. Two-thirds stern stuff, anyway, and a third macaroni cheese.
She plays Marlo, who at the beginning of the film is heavily pregnant with her third child. The pregnancy wasn’t planned and the prospect of another child fills her with dread, not least because her son Jonah (splendidly played by Asher Miles Fallica) suffers from what most of us would identify — even though, mysteriously, nobody in the movie does — as a form of autism.
For Jonah’s teachers, he’s an ‘out-of-the-box kid’. For doctors, he’s simply ‘atypical’. For Marlo, he’s much-loved and very precious, and also a nightmare, prone to sudden tantrums when his young life loses its sense of order. Jonah’s older sister, eight-year-old Sarah (lia Frankland), is a calmer presence, but even so, how will Marlo cope when she has the baby?
Her mordant sense of humour — ‘such a blessing’, she says of the impending birth, meaning it not one iota — probably won’t be enough.
Nor will the support of her husband Drew (Ron livingston), a decent fellow unhelpfully addicted to video games. Marlo needs back-up and her wealthy brother, concerned and condescending in just about equal measure (and with a hilariously spoilt wife), offers to provide it.
He says he’ll pay for Marlo to have a night nurse, to take some of the strain when the baby arrives.
A choppily edited montage sums up how onerous the strain is. We see Marlo gloomily breast- feeding, expressing milk, changing nappies, punctuated by an occasional fleeting kiss on the top of her head when Drew leaves for work or arrives home.
Mercifully, I wasn’t watching with my wife, who might have been entitled to give me a dig in the ribs, remembering the arrival of our third child 19 years ago. I prefer to recall that I applied my shoulder fully to the wheel, but that’s what this film does to parents; it makes you think back, smiling in recognition one minute and wincing the next.
Anyway, just as Marlo seems about to cave in, with the added blow that Jonah’s school can no longer accommodate him, along comes the ‘ night nurse’, Tully ( Mackenzie Davis), a sunny, svelte 26-year- old with a disconcerting habit of wearing crop- tops and a precociously reassuring manner.
Cinematic nannies generally fall into two camps: they either tend towards Mary Poppins and Mrs Doubtfire, or towards Rebecca De Mornay’s Peyton Flanders in The Hand That Rocks The Cradle (1992). Tully seems so much the former, appearing almost too good to be true, that it’s easy to believe she might end up being the latter.
But indubitably she brings happiness and purpose back into Marlo’s careworn life, even into her sagging sex life.
Of course, all is not exactly as it seems. It rarely is in the movies. But this is still in many ways an everyday, universal tale of motherhood, from which Reitman has ingeniously crafted a compelling film.
The writer is Diablo Cody, who teamed up with Reitman 11 years ago to make the excellent Juno. That too was about an unwanted pregnancy, but from the perspective of a 16-yearold free spirit, not a middle-aged mum. Significantly, Cody was childless when she wrote Juno and she’s now a mother of two. It shows.
I Feel PReTTy is another film about a woman’s self-esteem, but just as there’s more to Tully than meets the eye, with I Feel Pretty there’s less.
Amy Schumer plays Renee, who feels overweight and unattractive until she falls off an exercise bike, bangs her head, and comes round convinced that she’s gorgeous. Before
the personality change she stays in the shadows; after it, she bursts out of them, and bags her dream job as a receptionist at the glossy cosmetics company she worked for as a lowly data processor.
Soon, squeaky-voiced company CEO Avery LeClaire (Michelle Williams, having a high-pitched ball) realises that Renee has keener ideas about the marketing of a new line of make-up, targeted at ordinary women, than any highlypaid executive.
The storyline might remind you of the 1988 film Big, and I Feel Pretty acknowledges the debt. It is while watching Big that Renee feels inspired to pray for a miracle.
After that miracle strikes, the film follows a predictable and derivative course, as Renee first lands then loses a nice boyfriend (Rory Scovel), ultimately learning lots of profound lessons about beauty being only skin deep.
Of course, Schumer is a fine comic actress and does her considerable best with patchy material. There are other pleasures too, with roles for supermodels past and present, Lauren Hutton and Naomi Campbell.
But I Feel Pretty, a debut feature for writer- directors Abby Kohn and Marc Silverstein, never quite becomes the joyous, feelgood comedy-with-a-message it sets out to be. It could have done, dare I say, with a makeover.