“Where did you go?” he asks his pregnant and exhausted wife as she leans against their car under fluorescent gas station lights. Her gaze rests just over his shoulder, distant, but focused. Then, as suddenly as she wasn’t, she’s here. “Did you say something?” she asks. She’s so tired.
Tully, the third yarn spun from collaborators writer Diablo Cody and director Jason Reitman, begins waist-deep in motherhood. Marlo (Charlize Theron) is a mother of soon-to-be three, and looks it body and soul. She is supported by her husband Drew (played with next-level haplessness by Ron Livingston) and her new money brother Craig (an efficiently utilized Mark Duplass) who offers the gift of a night nanny to help with the new baby.
The film is a thematic branch of the Cody-Reitman oeuvre. Their first effort Juno hit theaters in 2007 to undeniable acclaim and followed the teenage namesake as she navigated the emotions and physicality of unexpected pregnancy. Early on, it is decided the baby will be given up for adoption; a singular act that makes Juno a mother once and forever. In the release of her child to another, her role becomes static. Cellular.
The feeling of primal responsibility for a life that is the extension of one’s own, and in greater measure, decidedly unique, is explored in Tully, too. The film goes further into the reality of what it means to be the still-center of a life that must grow within and away from where it began so it can become whole.
She saw it happen before it happened. Her son’s hand shot away from his body and collided with the cup of milk in front of him. She watched the liquid as it stretched toward her, on her. The shirt sticks to the skin of her stomach and catches on the clasp of her bra as she pulls it over her head.
Her daughter breathes out. “Mom. What happened to your body?”
People talk into Marlo, their words authoritative and expecting. In a meeting with the principal of her children’s school, she rests her hand on her pregnant stomach as it is referred to simultaneously as a blessing and eventual disruption to the emotional development of her young son. A stranger monologues about trace amounts of caffeine in a decaf latte, and does little to hide her disdain when Marlo orders the drink anyway.
Guilt seeps out of her from all ends. It is in every look, every yawn, every increasingly frantic plea to her son to stop kicking the back of the driver’s seat, and to please, please stop screaming. In a moment of shrill cacophony, Marlo pulls from her purse the yellow Post-It with the number of the help Craig offered to pay for.
And so Tully (Mackenzie Davis) arrives in the nick of time in the middle of the night. She is a soft spark in the carpeted foyer, peeling away winter layers and holding eye contact. She is curious and warm. She is awake.
A shorthand is quickly established between the two women. They are less the sole twin guardians of the baby, but peers. Almost.
It is a beautiful day in the park.
She can’t remember the last time she heard the birds singing. She can’t remember the last time someone spoke to her about her. She can’t remember the last time she slept that well.
One night over homemade sangria, Marlo asks Tully if she’s in a relationship. “I am,” she responds, sitting up straight. “Several.” They laugh at the sentiment. It’s a silly thing to say out loud, even if it’s true, even if it’s healthy. “I used to be like you,” Marlo tells her. “I rode every horse on the carousel before I met Drew.” “What horse was Drew?” Tully asks. “He was a bench,” Marlo responds.
The line reads as a stark admission that entering into marriage is submission. It is, of sorts, but to what, and “at what cost” is variable. In film, married life is so often portrayed with the heavy hand of death. Two lives snuffed into one.
A carousel is a more apt metaphor for the chaos of one’s personal history merging with another. Life doesn’t slow down and it doesn’t speed up. It stops when it’s over.
Her head burns from alcohol. Her friend is leaving. Bikes line the fence outside the bar, each one locked to the next. She yanks at all of them.
“You got what you wanted! You’re boring! You have those kids and you give them that sameness everyday! That’s your gift to them! You’re safe!”
A bike finally cracks free and she swings herself on, the words drowning out as she pumps her legs.
“I’m not safe! I’m scared!”
A different evening, Tully poses the question of Theseus’s paradox: if the wood of a ship has been replaced plank by plank every year since it was built, is it still the same ship once all the original wood is gone? Marlo shakes her head. Most all human cells, though, Tully tells her, have been regenerated over time into adulthood. The question becomes: does a biological inevitability make it literally impossible to hold onto who you think you are?
Marlo sees Tully as the promise of a gloriously uncertain future not yet tainted by fear or doubt. She is an injection of life into the present.
This might be the last time they see each other. She feels warm with medicine. She feels clear.
If Juno was about the bodily process of becoming a mother, then Tully is an all-encompassing look at the day in, day out of being one. Over time, Marlo, and her myriad potential, sinks further and further out of sight. She forgets herself because so does everybody else.
