Charlize Theron’s latest movie reunites her with screenwriter Diablo Cody and director Jason Reitman in Tully, which isn’t explicitly a sequel to Young Adult, but might as well be.
Not much happens in the trailer: Charlize Theron is a mother. She’s married to Ron Livingston, aka Berger from Sex and the City who broke up with Carrie via Post-It. They have a well-appointed home, two children, a bouncing newborn, and the means to hire the titular Tully (Mackenzie Davis), a night nanny who shows up seemingly out of nowhere. Part actual nanny and part emotional support system for a downtrodden Charlize, battered by motherhood and, apparently, her 30s.
“I’m here to take care of you,” Tully says when she shows up (by surprise?) at the front door. “I’m just not used to people doing things for me,” Theron replies.
What unfurls looks like the denouement of Cody’s filmic meditation on being a young woman, completing the cycle that Juno started in 2007. There are meditations on motherhood, breast pumps, the changing body, and distant husbands who go to work and then want to have sex. Charlize Theron’s life is fine to start, and then seems to get perceptibly better, unless there’s a twist. Tully hits theaters on April 20.