MOM CYCLONE

Opening today:

Tully--The latest from screenwriter Diablo Cody and director Jason Reitman, the team that brought us 2007's Juno, is another brightly-written comedy about pregnancy and motherhood. But the mother in question isn't a teen this time, she's a full-fledged adult. This may, indeed, be what's bugging her.

When we first meet Marlo (Charlize Theron), a suburban mother of two, she's massively on the verge of becoming a mother of three. Her husband (Ron Livingston) is an OK guy, but travels a lot for work, and spends a lot of time playing video games when he is home. Her sweet-natured but socially odd little son (he's euphemistically described as "quirky") creates difficulties at the private school he can only attend through the good graces of Marlo's irksomely rich and successful brother (Mark Duplass).

This same brother offers Marlo the gift of a "night nanny" for the new baby so that she can get some sleep. Marlo's repulsed by the idea at first, but soon after the baby is born, utterly overwhelmed and exhausted by her workload, she capitulates. The nanny, a lissome young hipster called Tully (Mackenzie Davis) swoops in like Marlo's own private Mary Poppins, not only minding the baby but cleaning the house overnight, making cupcakes and seeing to other domestic duties. Perhaps more importantly, she gets Marlo back in touch with her own identity.

The first quarter or so of this movie impressively dramatizes the daunting challenges of navigating motherhood, especially with multiple kids, especially if you aren't rich. It gets to you like a lot of movie depictions of harried parenting don't--it's almost frightening at times. This is partly due to Cody's snarky but emotionally plugged-in, glibness-free dialogue, and partly to Reitman's deft montages.

But it's also due in large part to Theron, who has a mature openness here, and a wild, harrowing beauty that makes even her own conventionally glamorous earlier roles seem tame. There's poignancy to Marlo, even a hint of the tragic, at the same time that she's a deeply sympathetic comic figure. As the breezy yet direct Tully, Davis is a fine foil for Theron; the two actresses slip into a startlingly relaxed and intimate rhythm from their first scene together.

As the story progresses, however, it slowly becomes clear that Marlo's conflict isn't just about the logistics of parenting, it's also about the perceived implications of the role. Marlo, we learn, was once an English Lit major and downtown NYC type, and, as with Jason Bateman's character in Juno, she's shaken by the prospect of permanently trading in the hip boho cred which Tully reminds her of for domesticity. Diablo Cody seems to regard this loss of pose as an adult rite of passage: For Cody, becoming a fully committed parent means giving up your dreams of being cool.

LET'S DO THE TIME WARP

Source material for film has ranged from, at the prestigious end, masterpieces of world literature and drama and momentous historical events, down the slide to pulp fiction and comic books to, in recent years, old TV shows and video games and even theme park rides. I suppose it was inevitable that sooner or later somebody would make a movie based on a classified ad.

“Wanted: Somebody to go back in time with me. This is not a joke…You’ll get paid after we get back. Must bring your own weapons. Safety not guaranteed. I have only done this once before.”

This ad ran in Backwoods Home Magazine in 1997. Perhaps through its combination of mysterious content and matter-of-fact language, it gained attention online, even though, as it turned out, it was indeed a joke, penned by an editor as a space-filler. Now it’s been made into Safety Not Guaranteed, Colin Trevorrow’s sweetly amusing hybrid of slacker romantic comedy and science fiction.

The heroine is Darius (Aubrey Plaza), a woebegone, vaguely snarky nerd-girl intern at Portland Magazine. She and another intern, a lovelorn young Indian named Arnau (Karan Soni) are detailed to assist Jeff (Jake Johnson) a snide, obnoxious reporter for the magazine, to travel to an Oregon seaside town and investigate the ad. It quickly becomes clear that Jeff only pitched the story as an excuse to go to the town and reconnect with an old summer flame from his teen years, so Darius and Arnau end up doing most of the legwork.

Darius soon finds that the ad was placed by Kenneth (Mark Duplass), a strange but scruffily attractive stock clerk at a supermarket. She presents herself as a respondent to the ad. He’s mistrustful, but the two gradually bond, and begin to fall in love as they prepare for the trip back—but to what time period, and why?

If this all sounds a little on the too-cute-by-half side to you, I can only tell you that I went into Safety Not Guaranteed bracing myself for the worst in urban-hipster adorableness, and was won over. The script, by Derek Connolly, has some witty dialogue, and maybe more importantly a terrific structure that’s generous to all the characters, almost like that of a Shakespearean pastoral. The movie’s brevity helps, too. I might have preferred a lighter, more ambiguous touch to the movie’s final few minutes, but that’s just a personal taste.

Better still are the performances. I regret to say I’m not strong enough, in my dotage, to resist the charms of young Plaza, with her upturned, skeptical glower that shifts occasionally into an unexpected smile.

Just about everyone else in the cast brings something to the party as well. Indeed, the subplot involving Johnson—sort of a leaner, less virile Mark Ruffalo—was for me almost more successful than the main plot, in part because of the mature, grounded sexiness of Jenica Bergere as the old girlfriend Jeff’s there to see. He reconnected with her on Facebook, of course—a much more common way, these days, of going back in time.