Midlife crisis pregnancy

‘Juno’ filmmakers go back in utero to less nurturing results

Here’s a movie that desperately wants to say something about reality—yet it’s completely divorced from it.

“Tully” is the latest joint from “Juno” (2007) collaborators Diablo Cody (she won an Oscar for her screenplay) and director Jason Reitman. They’ve reteamed with their “Young Adult” (2011) star Charlize Theron in an indie contrivance too clever for its own good.

That’s no more evident than in the title character herself, a blithe and ebullient young woman who is, to coin an archetype, a Manic Pixie Dream Nanny.

Theron plays Marlo, a 40s-ish wife and mother whose midlife crisis is sparked by an unexpected pregnancy. About to pop, she’s subsisting in an exhausted haze of prepartum depression.

The opening half-hour is bogged down by Marlo’s overwhelming despair. She represses it under a meek politeness, and Reitman tries to mix empathy with laughs, but I’m not sure if real-life moms will find it to be relatably cathartic or a buzz-killing trigger.

Compounding matters is a grade-school son whose anxieties manifest in tantrums and meltdowns. Marlo has no clue what he suffers from—neither do the education professionals at his private school—and even three different doctors were left baffled, unable to provide a diagnosis. Everyone just keeps calling the kid “quirky” while any armchair psychologist viewer would want to yell at the screen, “He’s on the spectrum, you idiots!”

That’s a prime example of how oblivious “Tully” is to its own forced machinations within a high-concept plot that’s pretty lazy in the details. Most side characters aren’t people, just devices, mere obstacles or catalysts for Marlo to effect change in her existential crossroads. An episodic patchwork of ideas revolving around a premise, “Tully” feels more like a three-episode dramedy binge than it does a crescendoing narrative or character portrait.

The ersatz “Episode 2” kicks off with the entrance of the titular saving grace, Tully (Mackenzie Davis), a twenty-something overnight caretaker hired by Marlo’s rich brother. She cares for the newborn while Marlo sleeps unabated (save for the occasional feeding). A bohemian free spirit, Tully becomes more than the hired help. She evolves into Marlo’s surrogate life coach, psychotherapist, Zen counselor, and best friend.

Then things get really weird.

Pushing provocative buttons and crossing boundaries in shocking ways, “Tully” starts to go off the rails to a degree that will challenge anyone with some sympathy left for Marlo. There’s a design to where this is going, but Cody and Reitman intentionally cloak that purpose for as long as they can—past any reasonable point of leeway.

Whether you’re taken by surprise or catch wise early on, the moment of epiphany will likely be supplanted by disappointment—perhaps you’ll feel a bit insulted that Reitman and Cody would structure their magical unrealism on such a tired cliché.

A satisfaction comes when some sense is finally made of Marlo’s spiraling behavior, but then we begin to realize just how much we’ve been jerked around by manipulatively coy filmmakers and their engineered cinematic hipstery.