I saw the latest Jason Reitman Diablo Cody collaboration* Tully a few weeks ago, so, it’s not fresh in my mind but I wanted to talk about it anyway. There will be spoilers below.

One of the most prominent narratives I see in movies is about how domestic life is terrible but, in the end, it’s wonderful and the only purpose in life et cetera et cetera. Tully is similar only it really ups the ante in how challenging raising children can be.

It follows the story of Marlo, played by Charlize Theron, as she is about to have her third child. She and her husband Drew (Ron Livingston) are a middle class family doing their best. And Tully makes it look hard. Really really hard. The early scenes of Marlo and her son Jonah – who has some sort of autism – played like a Christopher Columbus movie directed by Lars von Trier. Then the montage of taking care of a newborn baby made me relieved to be child free.

Marlo’s rich brother Craig (Mark Duplass) buys her something called a night nanny to help with the baby so she can get some sleep.

I wasn’t sure if I was going to see it so I went ahead and read an article that gave away the twist. (Though, I was pretty sure from the trailer that there had to be some kind of twist.)

So, here’s the twist.

Ready?

Marlo never takes her brother up on the night nanny and the woman who does show up – Tully – is just a younger version of herself.

I wasn’t sure if I would have totally understood the twist if I didn’t know it going in. Tully, played by Mackenzie Davis, is very nurturing but also can afford her carefree positivity because she’s so young.

Diablo Cody apparently pitched this as, “What if your younger self can come and save you?” Maybe I’m showing my forties here but Tully didn’t seem to be the kind of person that I would want to return to being, even if she helped make me realize that I liked my current life. Also, she was a distraction from and perhaps a delusion caused by postpartum depression and dangerous levels of sleep deprivation.

I’ve found the Jason Reitman movies that I’ve seen to be incredibly cynical. Certainly Young Adult and Up in the Air were. (I also saw Labor Day but really have no idea where that one was coming from.) I’m just going to go ahead and project here but Jason Reitman probably had a decent childhood, certainly a comfortable one being the son of the director of Ghostbusters and everything. Where does this cynicism come from?

The one line that really got to me was when she was describing her life (and comparing her husband to all the other merry go round men she’d been with as “the bench”) and said, “If I had a dream that didn’t come true, I could be mad at the world, instead I’m just mad at myself.”

To me this movie wasn’t about anyone saving you. It was about the stark reality of adulthood and never being able to go back to your youth.