Tully (2018)

Film: Tully (2018)
Stars: Charlize Theron, Mackenzie Davis, Mark Duplass, Ron Livingston
Director: Jason Reitman
Oscar History: Theron landed a Globe nod, but that was as far as it went.
Snap Judgment Ranking: 3/5 stars

Frequently when it comes to movies, there are films that you think about quite often even if initially you weren't in-love (more in-like) with them.  For me, this pretty well describes the collaborations between Jason Reitman & Diablo Cody.  I have maybe seen Juno twice in my life credits-to-credits, but I still feel like I can quote most of it, and the same can be said for Young Adult.  Reitman is great at framing these stories, but it's really Cody whose words and insights into the journey of women as they progressively get older who makes it sing.  Tully is a film not bereft of controversy (though, really, isn't everything "controversial" in this knee-jerk reaction world?), but it's also an insightful look into one woman's life as she progressively ages and encounters depression and her own midlife crisis.

(Spoilers Ahead) The movie centers on Marlo (Theron), a woman of about 40 who is pregnant with her third child.  Her home life is largely absent of any real excitement.  She loves her kids, even her son Jonah who has some sort of mental disorder that his teachers & psychologists haven't been able to pinpoint, and she has a husband Drew (Livingston) who loves her, but in a comfortable way where the romance is largely gone from their lives.  When she gives birth, her brother Craig (Duplass) is worried that she might suffer from depression like she did when she gave birth to Jonah, and insists that she hire a night nurse to help her with the first few months.  This results in her eventually hiring Tully (Davis), a beautiful young woman, bohemian & insightful, whom she quickly befriends and starts to reexamine her life through her.  There's a lot of interesting commentary on youth and aging and what "our dreams" should actually end up looking like as the years go by, with special care given by both Theron and Davis to their characters.

The film's best parts are their conversations, with Cody's insight into the aging process & the secret pains of women being particularly interesting.  There's a great scene late in the movie where Tully essentially tells Marlo, who is opining the loss of her youth, (paraphrasing) "but isn't this the life that everyone dreams of-comfortable with a loving family?"  That seems to be at the center of a movie that is directly talking about postpartum depression/psychosis, but also giving a larger commentary on the inevitability of growing older, of feeling like you're done with chapters of your life and aren't ready yet to move on to another phase.  It's interesting to see Theron, (still breathtaking at 42), feel pangs of jealousy over the younger Davis and make it seem believable.  This look at aging was so bizarrely frank, and Cody does a superb job of saying things that you learn between, say, 26 and 40, but not so much where it feels out-of-place or affirmed with the knowledge of Theron at 60 or 80.  These dialogues (along with Theron's performance) are the reason to see this movie.

It's a pity, then, that they had to go for the obvious gimmick toward the final third of the movie, which took me out of the picture.  Toward the end of the movie, it is revealed that Tully is in-fact a figment of Marlo's imagination, a living incarnation of her younger, freer self, and she's been having some sort of manic episode these many months.  This twist is largely where the controversy comes (in the same way that Remember Me threw a tragedy into its third act as a jaw drop), and while I don't agree that it feels controversial (art is not supposed to coddle us, but challenge us and occasionally make us feel uncomfortable things), I do feel like it was cheap.  Having Tully not exist, but instead just be an extension of Marlo's world invites a whole host of questions about what we saw earlier, and how much was real or not, and as a result you don't know whom you're looking at in the final, happy moments of the picture.  It doesn't ruin the movie, but it definitely notches it down a star, in my opinion, as it feels like the sort of quick-fix ending that Cody is better than (look at the brilliant way she completed Young Adult, for example).  Still, though, this is another sign that Cody's one of the better screenwriters working in Hollywood, and I hope we don't have to wait another four years before she works with Jason Reitman again.