Americana oversimplified

Tully (2000) must have been on my Netflix que for years and years before finally making its way to the number one spot and arriving at my door. I don't remember why I put it on my que nor when I put it there, but its long journey finally came to an end after sitting on my coffee table for nearly a month. And lets just say it wasn't worth the journey.

Tully surrounds Tully Coates Jr. a good looking farmers son from rural nowhere trying to make sense of his families past without sacrificing his future. Often times I will point out movies that have achieved a level of greatness in filmmaking, whether it be in writing, acting, style, tension, pace and point them out as a means to learn from them. Sometimes I think one can learn even more from a poorly executed film, and Tully has film-school 101 mistakes in spades.

I don't want to harp on the movies flaws too much because I do understand that it was a low budget feature. And do I ever understand the difficulties of making a low budget film, but what I can't understand is the overwhelming support and adulation for this film from both the public (imdb score) and certain critics I respect (Roger Ebert). So for the sake of argument lets get into where this thing falls short.

At first Tullys biggest problem is being too good looking and not knowing what girl to sleep with in the town. Then we find out that his fathers farm owes 300,000 dollars and his father doesn't seem to know why. Then comes the exposition and the staring. Literally the whole film goes a little something like this, character gets upset about the past, sits on the hood or sometimes roof of his car looks out onto the picturesque landscape and tells his or her feelings to whoever is there with them. Then cuts to them staring and thinking. About what we don't know. Anything relatively interesting that may of happened, happened in the past and is only shared to us through conversation. I wanted to see those scenes! The scenes they described, not them sitting on the hood of their vehicles describing them poorly. If you are writing a screenplay you don't need to have the characters say stuff like "what is wrong" every ten minutes when we the audience already know what is wrong, and if your going to have a film where the past comes back to haunt you, use flashbacks, one can only take so many scenes of characters, being poorly acted, talking about things we are not seeing and then how it makes them feel. And if you are going to have long shots of people staring out into space, at least try and communicate a bit what they are thinking. It is melodrama at its worst.

And to top all that off, the score for this film felt like it could have been done by 12 year old who just sat at piano and randomly made sounds. The score tried to be a mask and tell us what to feel but it couldn't even do that correctly.

Why Tully had any success at all is beyond me. Maybe because it is so uniquely American and sad that people felt like they had to like it. I wouldn't even recommend skipping this film, I almost want people to watch it to learn what not to do if they find themselves writing a script.

*1/2