MOVIE REVIEW: 'Tully' shows us how hard parenthood can be — and how a modern-day nanny can help

There aren't a lot of other actresses working in Hollywood today who could transition inside of a year from steely, sharp-as-a-stiletto international assassin to frumpy, beleaguered mother of three, and seem equally comfortable in either role, but Charlize Theron has always danced to a different bassline.

Here, she plays Marlo, a put-upon woman having just turned 40 with two young children and a third very much on the way. She lives in an unremarkable house somewhere on the suburban plains outside of New York with her loving but equally stressed husband, Drew (Ron Livingston), daughter Sarah (Lia Frankland), a perfectly amenable 8-year-old, and a difficult young son (Asher Miles Fallica) who may or may not be autistic, but has definitely outstayed his welcome at the private school Marlo and her husband have scrounged to send him.

Already stressed to the gills, Marlo gives birth to another daughter, and the added stress of yet another loud, exceedingly needy little mouth sends her into a tailspin of horrible repetition, endless diapers, stained clothes, and general chaos, a plight hammered home by director Jason Reitman, who puts us through his protagonist's bleary gauntlet with a series of smartly cut and debilitating montages.

At her lowest ebb, Marlo finally calls the number of a "night nanny" given to her by her very wealthy brother (Mark Duplass), whose ordered family life, and fantastic Architectural Digest home stands in stark contrast to his thoroughly overwhelmed sister. Shortly thereafter, Tully (Mackenzie Davis) appears one evening to help Marlo with her baby. Bright, caring, and supremely confident, the 25-year-old Tully, slim, beautiful and living a life of adventure and curiosity initially strikes Marlo as "weird," but shortly thereafter, they become indelibly tight, and Tully allows the thoroughly sleep-deprived mother to restore herself, while cleaning the house thoroughly, and baking fantastically ornate cupcakes for her son to take to his class.

As Marlo begins to unwind and loosen her grip, she becomes much more of the kind of person and mother that she wants to be -- there for her kids, spending time preparing dinner, enjoying her time with her husband. As she and Tully continue to bond, it appears as if this waif-ish Millennial Mary Poppins has just about righted the ship, but then she convinces Marlo to go out with her back in her old stamping grounds of Brooklyn, throwing down drinks and hitting a thrashy club show, even as Tully tells her she's going to have to move on from the family.

Written by Diablo Cody, which reunites the creative team behind the familiarly acerbic Juno, the film is given to Cody's famously particular comic asides (one of her brother's hilariously type-A children joins a talent show to perform "pilates"), but at its heart, it shows the former wild-child attempting to make the leap to motherhood while keeping her unbridled soul intact.

It's always an interesting process to watch a writer attempt to work out a thorny self-debate in the course of a three-act narrative, and Cody, whose best efforts have a touch of the extensively therapized vagabond to them, seems to have really dug deep for this one. Reitman, whose highlights include Up in the Air, has also had a checkered career -- as anyone who had the misfortune of sitting through Labor Day would attest -- but given a solid script, and with such a fantastic actress as his lead, he has returned to the land of the well-lived.

For her part, Theron takes to this role the way she does most of her other ones, by throwing herself headlong into her character's space and inhabiting them as fully three-dimensional people. Marlo isn't some kind of sweetly conjured object of humorous attention -- think Mila Kunis in Bad Moms as the worst kind of offender -- she's actually bitter, and overwhelmed and prone to lashing out with the kind of ferocity that suggests she would rather be almost anyone other than herself ("I want to kill myself," she says flatly in the car en route to her brother's spectacular mansion for dinner, with her kids in the back seat). To watch her struggle to lose her baby weight -- jamming nachos into her maw and watching episodes of a horrific reality series called Giggalos -- and collapse down on herself is to see the genuine flip-side horror of the miracle of childbirth, the immediate aftermath which reduces parents to little more than zombie-like apparitions whose unrelenting misery extends unceasingly from days that never seem to end.

MovieStyle on 05/04/2018