Tully

The movies of Jason Reitman and Diablo Cody feel like they were made by people trying really hard to be grownups but who aren’t really. Like a 19-year-old hoping to pass himself off as 34 by grimacing and talking about the weather in a deep voice just so he can buy beer. Which is pretty fucking stupid, by the way, because every kid around here knows that I’ll buy if they pay and let me keep one can out of every six. If they want a big bottle I just take mine off the top.

Joke’s on those stupid kids. I pretend to give them all the change, but really I buy one of those giant 25-cent gumballs from the machine by the door every time. I can’t chew gum because my doctor says I have “soft teeth” and “rotted tissue.” But I’ve been running my racket long enough to have a shoebox full of them and I’m hanging onto them. When the apocalypse happens, gumballs will be in high demand and I’ll be the richest man in the world. People will want gumballs, because you can’t chew on gold. I digress.

Cody wrote and Reitman directed Juno, Young Adult and now Tully. In every one of them, they substitute a sense of real adulthood with a take that feels like an ambitious high school class kid making a musical version of Dicken’s Bleak House. They pile on the grim, the dark and the mean-spiritedness as though all of that shit is adulthood. Some may call it cynicism, but it comes across a lot more like a kid in a suit spouting H.L. Mencken. He doesn’t understand what he’s saying, just that it feels pretty smart because it elevates them and hurts someone else.

Charlize Theron plays Marlo, a middle-aged mother of two with another due any minute. She’s harried and wiped out, ground down from her previous free life, now with a husband (Ron Livingston) who has generally checked out on fatherhood duties. She had suffered post-partum depression after the second child and is being offered something called a “night nanny” by her rich asshole brother (Mark Duplass). By the way, Theron is really fucking good here as a dead-eyed mom mourning the loss of a spark and a joy taken by motherhood.

The asshole brother, like a lot of this movie, is an undercooked and cliched character. He could be a source of humor or universal derision, a counterpoint or foil. Instead he comes across as just another rich asshole, maybe a neighbor in a gated community that the other wealthy people hate but they can’t explain why to those outside their walls without sounding like privileged fucks themselves. Like maybe he’s the guy who has a tiki bar while everyone else has moved on to retro wood-paneled cigar lounges. Or whatever the fuck rich people are into.

One of the reasons Marlo is so tired is that one of her kids is what my teachers used to call “special needs” to my parents and “a fucking nightmare” to each other. The movie doesn’t spell out the kid’s problems but it sure as hell looks like some sort of autism. I’m guessing some grassfucking executive said, “Autism is played out so don’t use that word.” Or maybe they were afraid of getting it wrong and getting protested, but didn’t want to put in the time to get it right. So, they kept the kid the same but took out the word. Either way, it plays like another white privilege touchstone for the movie to hit upon.

Tully (Mackenzie Davis) is the night nanny who comes into the house to let Marlo sleep. She’s young, pretty and a free spirit, full of boundless energy and sage wisdom. But she does more. She cleans, and she makes cupcakes and she befriends Marlo, giving her encouragement and reminding her of who she once was. She assures Marlo that she is a good mother, that her shitty choices in TV don’t need to be justified, that she still can be sexy and accomplished. In short, we watch a lot of late night talks where Marlo unloads and Tully absorbs.

But that doesn’t make much of a story, does it? Not unless you live in Norway and the alternative is watching a six-hour show about a fireplace. So, I sat waiting for the twist: that this sexy young lady would steal the husband, or that she wasn’t really the nanny all along, or that this was actually some sort of pedigreed take on the Lifetime Channel baby-snatching genre.

I wasn’t wrong. There is a twist. It’s hollow and comes after a few clunky plot points (like the Marlo and Tully teaming up to fuck the husband) that make it clear that something fantastical has to happen. By then, it’s too late into the movie and too unsurprising to have meaning. Despite it, the whiff of Cody and Reitman playing dress up as adults is what lingers. The movie hangs heavy with their idea of parenthood, that is it nothing but misery and pain, a bad choice to throttle your joy. Like a high school kid who swears she will never have children, Cody and Reitman provide no subtlety or nuance to their ideas, no reminder of why have people have kids to begin wth. No light escapes from their dim idea of being a grown up.

Maybe that could be funny, if only Cody and Reitman were self-aware of how undeveloped their ideas are. If only they acknowledged they aren’t really adults, their growth retarded by Hollywood’s bubble, and they don’t have grown-up ideas of how the world works. If they did, they’d have a shoebox full of gumballs, too. Two Fingers for Tully.