Movie Review: 'Tully'

Tully is a miraculous creation. Jason Reitman and writer Diablo Cody have crafted a movie so smart, sensitive, funny and daring that I am amazed it exists and isn’t a complete disaster. A simple story about a put upon mother becomes a taut examination of mental health and motherhood in a way you may be able to predict but you will still be very entertained by.

Tully stars Charlize Theron as Marlo, a mother of two who is expecting a third child as we join the story. Marlo is eight months pregnant when she visits her brother, Craig (Mark Duplass) and his new agey, modern yuppie, wife, Elyse (Elaine Tan) for a dinner party. At the party, Craig reveals that his baby welcoming gift to his sister is her very own night nurse.

Marlo is dubious of the idea of having a stranger come to her home at night to bond with her baby while she sleeps. However, after three weeks of new baby nightmares, Marlo gives in and calls for the night nurse and receives Tully (Mackenzie Davis). Tully is a spacey yet soothing young woman filled with bizarre little facts more interesting in the way she drops them into conversation than they are genuinely interesting.

Marlo is completely charmed by Tully who is taking care of both the baby and mom herself whose life is remarkably improved by getting a good night’s sleep. Tully seems to help every aspect of Marlo’s life, including her relationship with her seemingly bland husband, Drew (Ron Livingston). Drew seems like a lame appendage in the movie until the end when he delivers a moment that I will not soon forget.

There is little more to say about the plot—it’s both simpler and more complex than my description indicates. Reitman and Cody’s story moves in fits and starts that would be annoying in the hands of lesser filmmakers. Much like their previous teaming with Charlize Theron, the brilliant Young Adult, Tully has a cringe quality that somehow works in its favor.

In your everyday life you have met someone that you completely cannot relate to, no matter how much you try. Your every interaction with this person is awkward and stilted and you can’t wait for that moment to end. Reitman and Cody thrive on recreating moments like that; painfully awkward personal moments that you describe later to your best friend with gales of laughter. Tully has that type of wonderful laughter.

Charlize Theron’s Marlo is one of my favorite characters of recent years. I may not be a new mom in my 40’s but I could feel all of the dread, anxiety, exhaustion, and catharsis that Marlo experiences in Tully. Marlo is real and funny and sympathetic and my heart was rising and falling and rising again with every modest turn of her story arc. This is some of the best work of Theron’s career and something that deserves to be recognized come awards season.

Mackenzie Davis also shines as the titular Tully. While some will argue that Tully is a manic pixie dream nanny or that she’s a function of the plot rather than a catalyst of it, but I feel that Davis’s performance outweighs those arguments. Davis is lovable and funny and strange and as we grow to know her in the story and all that she represents, I fell further in love with the character rather than being repelled by how she’s used in this story.

To say much more about Tully than that would be to spoil some of the magic of this wonderfully odd movie. Tully has some of the best of Jason Reitman’s direction and all of the best of Diablo Cody’s writing, arguably the most mature and thoughtful of her work to date. Tully is warm, and smart, and laugh out loud funny without pandering. The laughs are big without being broad or sit-comic, and yet the movie nails the dramatic beats with just as much skill and care.

Tully is one of the best movies of 2018.