Tully (2018)

23 Monday Jul 2018

Tags

Charlize Theron, Comedy, Diablo Cody, Drama, Family relationships, Jason Reitman, Mackenzie Davis, Mark Duplass, Motherhood, Night Nanny, Review, Ron Livingston

D: Jason Reitman / 95m

Cast: Charlize Theron, Mackenzie Davis, Ron Livingston, Mark Duplass, Elaine Tan, Asher Miles Fallica, Lia Frankland, Gameela Wright

Already finding it difficult to deal with having two young children – quiet but impressionable Sarah (Frankland), and Jonah (Fallica), who has an undiagnosed developmental disorder – Marlo (Theron) is pregnant with an unplanned third child. With her husband, Drew (Livingston), working long hours or having to travel a lot, Marlo is often on her own, and finding it increasingly hard to be heavily pregnant and a full-time mother to pre-teens. When the baby, Mia, is born, the pressure becomes too much, and a meltdown at Jonah’s school brings Marlo to the realisation that she needs help. Acting on an offer from her brother, Craig (Duplass), to pay for a night nanny, Marlo is surprised to find a young woman called Tully (Davis) arrive one night and begin to make her life a lot more easier. The two women forge a strong bond, and Marlo finds herself with a new lease of life. But one night, Tully is uncharacteristically miserable, citing an issue with her roommate. At her suggestion, she and Marlo head into the city for a night on the town, a decision that is to have serious consequences…

The fourth collaboration between director Jason Reitman and writer Diablo Cody – after Juno (2007), Jennifer’s Body (2009), and Young Adult (2011) – Tully is a heartfelt look at the narrow ledge some mothers find themselves traversing when motherhood proves overwhelming. Marlo appears to have been struggling ever since Jonah was born, both with his behavioural problems, and her own expectations of being a mother. With pressure from the outside competing with pressure from within, Marlo’s inability to manage consistently or even occasionally is a given, and Cody’s script has fun piling on heap after heap of setbacks and misfortune, while placing Marlo in the kind of family unit where her getting through the day is a major achievement. Is it anyone’s fault? Perhaps, but Cody and Reitman aren’t about assigning blame, they’re about rescuing Marlo from the mire she’s trapped in. And so we meet Tully, the damsel in shining armour, Marlo’s saviour and nascent best friend. As their friendship grows and becomes overly important in helping Marlo cope – she literally blossoms before our eyes – the bond between mother and daughter slips sideways until it’s about mother and nanny instead. There’s a love affair of sorts here, but it’s refreshingly chaste and wonderfully done.

The movie is blessed by two outstanding performances from Theron and Davis. For most of the movie, Theron – who gained nearly fifty pounds for the role – appears unflatteringly, big and sweaty and looking red-eyed and exhausted. It’s a powerful, nuanced portrayal, with subtle flourishes throughout, but she’s matched by Davis, whose own performance is flecked with delicate little touches, a look here, a twinkle there. Together, the two actresses are mesmerising to watch, and dominate the narrative. Inevitably, with two such strong female roles at the movie’s centre, the male roles fare badly in comparison, with Livingston’s unobservant husband continually out of touch (unless confronted with an impromptu ménage à trois), and Duplass’s self-absorbed, materialistic brother given little to do beyond looking baffled and out of their depth when discussing “women’s issues”. This isn’t necessarily a feminist tract – Marlo makes too many poor choices for that – but it is a celebration of female solidarity, though as the movie unfolds, issues surrounding mental health begin to make themselves more keenly felt. This leads to a last act swerve in the narrative that isn’t completely successful, but at least brings the story to a (by then) predictable conclusion. But Reitman – directing as confidently and intuitively as ever – and Cody, are more focused on Marlo’s journey than her destination, and in that they’re more than successful.

Rating: 8/10 – with Theron and Davis at the top of their game, and in service to a balanced and thoughtful script, Tully is a perceptive look at the perils of motherhood told exclusively from the viewpoint of someone who can’t see those perils for having to deal with them; the kind of indie comedy-drama that rewards viewers in increasingly subtle and unexpected ways, it’s a genuine, ready and willing to please movie that has much to say and which does so very succinctly.

Ricki and the Flash (2015)

06 Friday Nov 2015

Posted by dullwood68 in Movies

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Tags

Comedy, Diablo Cody, Drama, Dysfunctional family, Jonathan Demme, Kevin Kline, Mamie Gummer, Meryl Streep, Mother/daughter relationship, Music, Musician, Review, Rick Springfield, Suicide attempt, Wedding

D: Jonathan Demme / 101m

Cast: Meryl Streep, Kevin Kline, Mamie Gummer, Rick Springfield, Sebastian Stan, Nick Westrate, Audra McDonald, Hailey Gates, Ben Platt

Let’s agree to disagree (perhaps): Meryl Streep can sing… sort of. She can carry a tune, certainly, but does she have the voice to be a rock singer? Well, as it turns out, it depends very much on the song (and particularly if it’s Bruce Springsteen’s My Love Will Not Let You Down, where she doesn’t). But thanks to Diablo Cody’s poorly constructed and focus-lite screenplay, maybe that’s the point, because Ricki, Meryl’s aging rock chick character, has been playing at the same bar for years, and has only managed to release one album in all the time she’s been a musician. She’s following her muse, and has sacrificed her family to pursue said muse, but it really seems as if Ricki hasn’t realised that her muse “left the building” ages ago.

On paper, Ricki and the Flash looks appealing and fun. The idea of La Streep strapping on a guitar and rocking out alongside Rick Springfield was no doubt more than enough to get the movie greenlit, and there’s plenty of songs included for Streep to wrap her larynx around, but while these scenes are fun to watch in a straightforward, head-on kind of way, the rest of the movie hangs around them like a groupie who’s only just realising they’re at the wrong gig. (And said groupie is likely to run for the exit as soon as Streep launches into an awkward, grating version of Lady Gaga’s Bad Romance.)

What’s confounding about the movie is that it never seems to go anywhere. We’re supposed to believe that Ricki is a long-absent mother who no longer talks to her family – ex-husband Pete (Kline), sons Josh (Stan) and Adam (Westrate), and daughter Julie (Gummer, Streep’s real-life daughter) – and whose selfish behaviour informs her every decision. But she drops everything when Pete calls to tell her that Julie’s husband has left her and it might be a good idea for Ricki to come and visit. Once she arrives, Julie is antagonistic toward her, as is Adam, though Josh, who is about to get married, is more sympathetic. With the family dynamics now firmly established, Cody’s script resolves each issue in turn with incredible non-credible ease, and does so to ensure that Streep gets to rock out again (and again… and again).

Things wouldn’t have been so bad if the various “issues” weren’t of such a poor standard that even the most desperate of soap operas would pass on them. The dialogue is just as bad, and begs the question is this really a script created by the writer of Juno (2007)? There’s a scene between Ricki and Pete’s second wife, Maureen (McDonald), that contains so many clichés – on both sides – that the viewer could be forgiven for thinking the lines were improvised and the scene was a rehearsal that somehow made it into the final cut, except you’d be convinced they could have come up with dialogue that was a lot, lot better. It’s a childish tit-for-tat exchange that neither actress can do much with, and it sits like an ugly child in the middle of a pretty girls’ photoshoot.

But it’s not just Cody’s banal script that makes it all so frustrating, it’s also Demme’s disinterest, which emanates from the director’s chair in waves. He never so much as comes close to engaging with the material, and scenes go by that are tonally flat and lacking in flair. The material is already less than exhilarating, but Demme’s approach harms the movie further, leaving it feeling like a bland TV movie. It’s left to the cast to try and inject some energy into the proceedings, and Streep is certainly game when called upon to belt out another rock staple, but the likes of Kline, Gummer and Stan aren’t given enough to do to make much of an impression.

In the end the script plumps for an eye-watering feelgood ending that wraps everything up nicely and without properly resolving any of the issues it’s tried to address earlier on, such as emotional abandonment, and robs itself of any dramatic resolution. It all ends with yet another excuse to put Streep behind the mike, and features a wedding party that seems to be made up entirely of professional dancers.

Rating: 4/10 – aimless, pointless, dreary, lifeless, meandering, ill-focused – all these are apt descriptions of Ricki and the Flash, a movie that never provides the viewer with a plausible reason for its existence; Streep somehow manages to hold it all together, but this is still a movie that wastes the talents of its cast, and suffers endlessly thanks to its wayward script and Demme’s absentee direction.