Uncomfortable question of ‘Tully’: Does motherhood erase you?
‘‘You pretty much are the baby right now,” says Tully, the night nanny for whom the recently released feature film is named. Impossibly young and thin, Tully, played by MacKenzie Davis, has a surplus of energy 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. The baby has taken over, 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?
(In a late scene, Tully points out to Marlo that virtually every cell in her body has been regenerated over the years, like a boat in which every board has been replaced. Is she, then, really the same person as she was 20 years ago? In what sense?)
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.
Tully is disturbing, but not primarily because it appears to portray postpartum psychosis.
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: “You” will not always leak milk, blood and water, and exist in a severely sleep-deprived state — for now, however, you are covered in milk in various stages of digestion and stumbling about in an adult diaper in the middle of the night.
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
This is the case of Marlo’s wealthy sister-in-law, Elyse, (played by 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.
Elyse and Marlo’s brother raise the idea of “gifting” Marlo with a night nanny.
Marlo’s husband worries that the in-laws 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. 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 does not 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. Rachel Marie Stone wrote this commentary for the Washington Post.