Although Tully bears a directorial credit for Jason Reitman - the self-effacing Canadian humanist whose work has grown ever more anonymous since 2009's Up in the Air - it's rather more obviously the handiwork of Diablo Cody, screenwriter of 2007's Juno, 2009's Jennifer's Body and 2011's Young Adult. From the last of these, the new film retains Charlize Theron, here rounder and mellower, but no less close to the end of some invisible tether; from the first, a baby bump that provides the source of all the stress - an unplanned (and heavily overdue) third child for Theron's Marlo. From Jennifer's Body, Tully takes... well, we'll get to that in due course.
For starters, what is apparent is that Cody - who gave birth to a third child of her own earlier this year - has embraced motherhood in a big way. Tully is all but a primer in how this experience might be lived by a woman well into her thirties (rather than Juno's inchoate wiseass): the mentally and physically exhausting business of belly-tending, bladder-pushing, milk-producing gestation; of treading barefoot on pieces of Lego at one in the morning, and sitting half-zonked in front of kids' films you don't, and don't care to, understand; and of doing all this with two other anklebiters in tow, and with little-to-no help from a hubby (in the film's case, Ron Livingston's Drew) whose first act, upon returning from the office, is to make pass-agg remarks about the microwave pizza being served up as a last-resort dinner, and whose second is to retire to the bedroom to play video games for the rest of the night.
When the plot kicks in, Tully feels like an oestrogen-infused variant of David Fincher's The Game (or even the recent Game Night): over dinner, Marlo's have-it-all brother (Mark Duplass) passes on details of the "night nanny" he and his wife employed to help raise their children for them. (He does this, we sense, as much to help his sister out as to point up how helpless she's become.) Enter Mackenzie Davis, trailing some of the young Laura Dern's uprightness, as Tully, the nanny in question, whose willowy, on-point togetherness would make Mary Poppins seem a slob, let alone the frazzled Marlo; it's somehow cruelly perfect that she should first waft into this household wearing a crop top that accentuates the untroubled flatness of her belly.
Suddenly, Marlo has time to sleep, make herself up, and cook food with actual vitamins in; suddenly, too, the film starts to take shape, setting two very different models of femininity - the bright, carefree twentysomething and the bloated, self-loathing burnout - to meet in the middle of another of Cody's typically warm, funny female friendships. Yet we can also feel this culturally savvy scribe playing with our expectations of the nanny genre, and where this particular relationship might be headed. Sitting cross-legged and smiling at the foot of the bed as her charge first latches onto the Theron nipple, Tully somehow seems too perfect; you might just have a panicky flashback to The Guardian's Jenny Seagrove or the way Rebecca de Mornay terrorised poor Annabella Sciorra in The Hand That Rocks the Cradle.
What follows can seem squarely heteronormative (as Reitman's movies generally have done): the sentiment underpinning Cody's script is that having babies is hard labour, but well worth it in the end, a line that's been around roughly since the Stone Age and may well have some truth to it, but which can nevertheless sound tedious, self-righteous and/or desperate coming even from one's nearest and dearest. If it wasn't already apparent from Juno, a very likable teen pregnancy drama that had to shrug its shoulders at the thought of abortion in order to see its conceit through to fruition, Cody may be a more conservative talent than first thought, which perhaps explains why she's been allowed through the studio gates on such a regular basis.
The trick she plays here - and it is, in the main, an effective one - is to flirt with something weirder. It's Tully donning the waitress outfit her employer has bought to seduce Drew in the bedroom, and mounting him with Marlo's approval (a very Reitman-ish kink, this: a guy who just wants a gal to bring him apple pie). It's a quasi-conspiratorial scene in the shitty nightclub bathroom to which our heroines repair when Marlo needs to expel breast milk, which seems to be heading towards some kind of girl-on-girl consummation. And it is, at the last, the ending, which has set some critics to throwing up their hands, and which left the paying (and generally enthusiastic) crowd I saw the film with filing out of the room, audibly nonplussed.
For my part, I exited feeling neither shortchanged nor especially elated. Inevitably, Tully's conclusion carries the whiff of self-sabotage, suggesting that the script was was intended as a bait-and-switch operation, rather than the heartfelt paean it once seemed to be. Equally, though, that ending was on the cards all along, set up in conversations our heroines have about molecules, and in a thousand creative writing exercises besides, and I'm loath to dismiss it entirely, as it does get at something some mothers of my acquaintance have felt in the wake of bringing forth new life: it makes a kind of emotional sense, even as it plays out as a narrative futz or a crib from an already well-cribbed source. See it for Theron, here confirmed as the most commanding and versatile performer in American movies, and for the neatly cast Davis, who really does seem to have emerged out of nowhere fully formed - then ponder whether Tully's final ten minutes support or undermine its central thesis.
Tully is now playing in cinemas nationwide.
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