There is something both disheartening and disconcerting about seeing someone like Jason Reitman, who for the first decade of the century had come with the intention of being the new big voice of mid-budget adult drama -and had successes to cement it-, and ended up being the maintenance manager of a franchise like ‘Ghostbusters’. Right now, after ‘Ghostbusters: Beyond,’ he holds the keys to the saga and is overseeing the next few years of expansion of the universe as more of a project leader than the filmmaker he was.
Of course, there is some irony in it, after a certain pushy touch when it comes to differentiating his films from the studio comedies made by his father Ivan Reitman. Not for that reason it ceases to be a pity that we will not have more complex and adult-themed films on the horizon that they look like tapes in which money has been invested, not indies that ask permission to exist. In other words, we will no longer have interesting gems like ‘Tully’, still available on Netflix until this Saturday, August 6.
When adult life runs you down
Reitman went back to working with old acquaintances to come up with something with a different flavor. On the one hand there is Charlize Theron, who already starred for him in the remarkable ‘Young Adult’. On the other is the screenwriter Diablo Cody, who wrote that and their great joint success ‘Juno’. But it is just that other film that brought these three names together that is the key to commenting on this one, since both interestingly reflect the midlife crisis from two different prisms.
Theron is Marlo, a mother of a large family with a newborn who further tests her patience and skills as a mother. Her children are demanding, there is not exactly economic flexibility and her husband works for so many hours that when she arrives she only wants to play video games (Ron Livingston). she could be perfectly a woman on the verge of a nervous breakdown.
But her brother (Mark Duplass) has an interesting gift idea: a night nanny, who takes care of the baby at night so that the parents can rest, in addition to other household chores. That lovely young nanny is Tully (Mackenzie Davis) and she almost seems like a godsend. But nothing is what it seems with this character, whose true condition is a secret that the film guards carefully and is best discovered by oneself.
‘Tully’: forget herself
Through the post-partum depression suffered by Theron’s character, Reitman and Cody interestingly explore the way in which a woman loses herself at a certain point in life. It is, really, an adult life crisis similar to the one studied years before in ‘Young Adult’, except that instead of portraying those people stuck in permanent childhood here is exposed to the suburban family model that has been proposed as an opposite ideal and can lead to being just as lost in life.
It is interesting that the meeting with these two figures was precisely the one that restored some creative vigor to Reitman after several films of irregular quality and irritating tendencies. Beyond the fact that some of his plays may be somewhat tricky, his dramatic work is very remarkable, and Theron offers one of her best jobs as an actress.
Without a doubt, it deserved more than that discreet passage through cinemas, which has ultimately condemned Jason to the task of restoring the old family car from which he has inherited the keys.