Motherhood often seems like a rigged game, doesn't it? Women who become mothers do the lion's share of the work of raising a child: everything from pushing the baby out their vagina (or undergoing major surgery to get it out) and feeding it with their bodies to cooking, cleaning, and chauffeuring. Yet mothers are judged so harshly. Take a sip of alcohol while pregnant or breastfeeding? You're a selfish monster. Don't have time to cook fresh, organic meals? Clearly you don't care about Junior's health. Yell at your kid? You're obviously an abusive bitch. And all of this work and judgement with very little support. The United States is one of the worst first-world countries for paternal leave.
And then if you don't decide to have kids? Well, you're also a selfish bitch. Your choice to not reproduce is a direct challenge to all those overworked mothers everywhere.
Written by Diablo Cody and directed by Jason Reitman, the team behind the overrated Juno and the underrated Young Adult comes the perfectly rated Tully. A funny, dark, surprising, and often devastating film about motherhood.
Charlize Theron stars as Marlo, a mom of two with a third on the way at the movie's start. Her husband, Drew (Ron Livingston) is well-meaning, but often absent: he works long hours, takes frequent business trips, and then zones out playing first-person shooter video games with headphones on at night. He's not a bad husband or father, he's just...not present.
So Marlo's rich brother, Craig (Mark Duplass in a small and very Duplassian role) offers to gift the couple a night nanny to help when the baby arrives. At first, Marlo resists, thinking that night nannies are creepy and bougie. But a few weeks after her baby girl is born, Marlo is desperate for help. Tully (Mackenzie Davis, who is great in everything) shows up and Marlo's world changes overnight--literally. She wakes up from her first restful night in forever to a clean house.
Although Marlo is skeptical of the very young and very Manic Pixie Dream Girl-ish Tully, the two quickly become close. Weirdly close, one might say. The movie takes some surprising turns that I already knew about going in--it was fun listening to the audience I was with react to some of the scenes. (Which I won't spoil in this review).
Tully isn't perfect--the resolution seemed to come too quickly and was tied up a little too neatly. And the character of Tully really *is* kind of a Manic Pixie cliche, although the nature of the relationship (mom and nanny, as opposed to boyfriend and girlfriend) really fucked with that trope nicely.
But my general impression was that Tully is a rare film to show motherhood for what it really is: exhausting, often thankless work. Yes, you experience the joy of raising children, but honestly...joy doesn't get up at night and feed the baby. Joy doesn't change diapers. Joy doesn't soothe chafed nipples. The idea that mothers should be paid in "joy" is absurd. The idea that a mother can and should shoulder so many emotional and physical burdens alone is absurd. The idea that if a mother isn't happy all the time, she's clearly a callous, unnatural woman is utterly absurd and dehumanizing to women. Women are people first. We're not baby machines.
You know what else our culture of motherhood in the US does? It pits women against each other. It pits moms against non-moms and moms against other moms. It suggests that one's life choices are a judgement on another's. And women are already fucked over more than men as it is.
I don't want kids. I never have and, despite people saying my biological clock will start ticking any day now, the older I get the *less* I want children. But I see a place for myself as a childfree adult in a culture that works moms to death. Children aren't raised just by their parents--they need other adults in their lives that they can look to and trust. Overworked moms and dads *need* a support system, and childfree adults can help build that net of support. Just because we're childfree (not child-less, mind you) doesn't mean we don't understand the fulfillment children bring to not just their parents, but to their communities. And on the flip side, just because someone is a parent doesn't mean that the don't have an identity of their own anymore.
Tully celebrates that interdependence we've been told we don't need when it comes to raising kids. It challenges the lie that parents and especially moms should be able to do all the work of raising kids AND STILL go to work, have a social life, have great sex, have a bangin' body. Fuck that. We need each other to lean on. We're human beings, for chrissakes. Don't let our fucked up culture of parenthood tear us apart rather than bring us together. If not for ourselves, then for our children.
Grade: A
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