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osprey_archerTallulah is a perfectly nice movie that will suffer in this review because I watched it around the same time that I watched Agnes Varda’s transcendent Vagabond. Both movies are about female drifters, and Vagabond makes Tallulah seem positively sentimental by comparison.
The problem is that Tallulah, unlike Vagabond, wants you to like its heroine, Lu, which means it can’t be quite honest about her. It wants you to like her even though you know that she’s a thief (she’s got a glove compartment full of stolen credit cards) and a liar (she turns up on her ex-boyfriend’s mother’s doorstep, carrying a baby that she claims is the boyfriend’s) and, oh, also a kidnapper. She totally stole that baby.
And of course you do like Lu, because she’s played by the impossibly winsome Ellen Page - and also because, while you know these things about Lu, the movie gently elides their uglier aspects. The only person we see really damaged by Lu’s thievery and lies forgives her almost instantly, and while Carolyn, the baby’s mother, is very distressed by her baby’s disappearance, she’s also such a cartoonishly awful mother that it seems entirely possible that the baby is actually better off with Lu.
Just in case we missed the point during Lu’s initial meeting with Carolyn - during which Carolyn hands her baby over to Lu on the assumption that Lu (who is stealing food from the room service trays) is part of the hotel staff, then rushes off to attempt to have an extramarital affair - after the kidnapping, Carolyn is also lectured by both a police officer and a social worker about her deficiencies as a mother. She is awful, but this begins to feel like special pleading on Lu’s behalf. How can we help but love this sweet young thing who selflessly rescues endangered babies, even if she is a little rough around the edges?
What keeps the movie from tipping headlong into cloying sentimentality is a surprisingly raw performance by Allison Janney, who plays Margo, the mother of Lu’s ex-boyfriend. Margo lives alone in a faculty apartment that isn’t really hers, stewing about her impending divorce from the husband who left her for another man. “All our friends think you did something really brave,” she tells her husband, during a lunch party that becomes a pivot point in the movie; but there’s nothing brave about deceiving his wife and son for decades. “You knew,” he insists - the immortal excuse of lies and cheats the world over: you knew, you believed because you wanted to be deceived, it’s your fault for believing me. But no. Margo didn’t.
Although possibly she’s developed a taste for it, given the swiftness with which she forgives Lu for foisting a fake grandchild upon her once she finds out that Lu kidnapped a baby. We’re clearly meant to find the bond that develops between Lu and Margo heart-warming, and because this is a movie and you know in the way that you know these things in movies that Lu truly has come to care about Margo and won’t hurt her again if given a second chance, it is.
But outside the context of movie magic - oh, Margo. Maybe it’s not the best idea to go rushing to the scene of the arrest to pledge your undying support to a girl who has kidnapped a baby and lied to you for the entirety of your brief acquaintance.
The problem is that Tallulah, unlike Vagabond, wants you to like its heroine, Lu, which means it can’t be quite honest about her. It wants you to like her even though you know that she’s a thief (she’s got a glove compartment full of stolen credit cards) and a liar (she turns up on her ex-boyfriend’s mother’s doorstep, carrying a baby that she claims is the boyfriend’s) and, oh, also a kidnapper. She totally stole that baby.
And of course you do like Lu, because she’s played by the impossibly winsome Ellen Page - and also because, while you know these things about Lu, the movie gently elides their uglier aspects. The only person we see really damaged by Lu’s thievery and lies forgives her almost instantly, and while Carolyn, the baby’s mother, is very distressed by her baby’s disappearance, she’s also such a cartoonishly awful mother that it seems entirely possible that the baby is actually better off with Lu.
Just in case we missed the point during Lu’s initial meeting with Carolyn - during which Carolyn hands her baby over to Lu on the assumption that Lu (who is stealing food from the room service trays) is part of the hotel staff, then rushes off to attempt to have an extramarital affair - after the kidnapping, Carolyn is also lectured by both a police officer and a social worker about her deficiencies as a mother. She is awful, but this begins to feel like special pleading on Lu’s behalf. How can we help but love this sweet young thing who selflessly rescues endangered babies, even if she is a little rough around the edges?
What keeps the movie from tipping headlong into cloying sentimentality is a surprisingly raw performance by Allison Janney, who plays Margo, the mother of Lu’s ex-boyfriend. Margo lives alone in a faculty apartment that isn’t really hers, stewing about her impending divorce from the husband who left her for another man. “All our friends think you did something really brave,” she tells her husband, during a lunch party that becomes a pivot point in the movie; but there’s nothing brave about deceiving his wife and son for decades. “You knew,” he insists - the immortal excuse of lies and cheats the world over: you knew, you believed because you wanted to be deceived, it’s your fault for believing me. But no. Margo didn’t.
Although possibly she’s developed a taste for it, given the swiftness with which she forgives Lu for foisting a fake grandchild upon her once she finds out that Lu kidnapped a baby. We’re clearly meant to find the bond that develops between Lu and Margo heart-warming, and because this is a movie and you know in the way that you know these things in movies that Lu truly has come to care about Margo and won’t hurt her again if given a second chance, it is.
But outside the context of movie magic - oh, Margo. Maybe it’s not the best idea to go rushing to the scene of the arrest to pledge your undying support to a girl who has kidnapped a baby and lied to you for the entirety of your brief acquaintance.
no subject
Date: 2018-08-30 11:38 am (UTC)What ultimately happens to the child?
no subject
Date: 2018-08-30 05:26 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2018-08-30 06:20 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2018-08-30 06:28 pm (UTC)