Tully

Tully (2018) is about a woman having her third child. Marlo is exhausted; her brother offers to pay for a night nanny and she accepts. Tully arrives at night, takes the baby, tidies the house and talks to her. Marlo sleeps for the first time in ages. Jason Reitman directed from a screenplay by Diablo Cody, after they had worked together on Juno and Young Adult. Charlize Theron put on around forty pounds for the part. The best of it is the first half: sleeplessness, the breast pump, school meetings, and nobody actually helping. The exhaustion of motherhood is shown without decoration. The turn at the end caused an argument. Many people working in mental health, and women who had experienced postpartum psychosis, said the film uses that condition as a surprise and turns an undiagnosed illness into a plot trick. Reitman and Cody said they had heard the criticism; Cody said she had written from her own postpartum experience. Mackenzie Davis plays Tully. It runs 95 minutes. Good for: honest films about motherhood, Charlize Theron, and Diablo Cody's dialogue. Less good for: the final turn retroactively weakens the realism of the first half. Postpartum mental health is used both as subject and as trick, and that objection lands. The husband is let off far too easily.