Author: Josh Rottenberg / Source: latimes.com
Two years ago, screenwriter Diablo Cody was in the middle of trying to write “a very big, commercial, four-quadrant movie” when she gave birth to her third child. After her first two kids, she had gotten back in the groove of work, but this time, shattered by exhaustion, she felt herself floundering both as a writer and as a parent.
“I was in this complete haze,” Cody remembers. “It was like I was disconnected from reality. All I could do was fantasize about having somebody come and pull me out of this underwater wreckage I found myself in. I thought, I wish somebody would just show up on my porch tonight and just take over everything so that I could take care of myself.”
Cody, 39, had always been dismissive of the idea of hiring a night nanny, thinking, she says, “the least I can do is wake up with my baby.” But this time she decided to enlist someone to help her over the hump of sleep deprivation. The experience was revelatory.
The big studio project fell away and the idea for another, more personal story began gestating in Cody’s mind — an idea that would eventually grow into the new film “Tully,” in theaters Friday. “I thought, imagine if an ordinary woman who doesn’t live in a world of night nannies and household help — what if somebody stepped in and gave her that gift?” she says. “How would she transform?”
In “Tully,” Charlize Theron stars as Marlo, an overburdened middle-aged mother of three whose life is turned upside down in unexpected ways when her wealthy brother (Mark Duplass) offers to hire a young night nanny (Mackenzie Davis) to help care for her newborn daughter.
Deliberately discomfiting and shot through with dark humor, the film marks Cody’s third collaboration with director Jason Reitman following the 2007 teen-pregnancy hit “Juno” and 2011’s darkly comic “Young Adult,” which also starred Theron.Even as she was writing “Tully,” Cody was well aware that a film that portrays a mother who is barely holding it together — and that tackles uncomfortable questions of how class intersects with parenting — threatened to touch a third rail in movies. “In TV, I’ve definitely noticed that people are more willing to embrace the flawed female protagonist, but there’s still something about the mother,” she says. “We can deal with an unlikable woman who’s freaking out. But if she’s freaking out on children, we’re out.”
For evidence of the risks, Cody needed to look no further than her own résumé. While “Juno” proved a runaway hit, grossing $231 million worldwide and earning Cody an Oscar for original screenplay, “Young Adult” — whose central character, an…
The post Charlize Theron and Diablo Cody on busting the myth of the supermom in ‘Tully’ appeared first on FeedBox.