BEFORE: A couple of late nights watching MSNBC, and suddenly my concerns over not seeing "Black Widow" in November seem very petty and selfish. There are people on the West Coast who have lost their homes, there are almost 200,000 dead because of a virus, and our country's democratic ideals have been turned upside-down, and I'm fretting over one movie? Sometimes I'm the worst. I mean, come on, let's get it together here, I'm alive and I'm healthy (relatively) and I still have my sanity (again, relatively) so I'm resolved to quit complaining and just stay the course, and try to look on the bright side of things. And if that's not possible, then the less dark side.
Allison Janney carries over again from "Liberal Arts", and that's the end of her chain, but she'll be back again one more time in October.
THE PLOT: Desperate to be rid of her toddler, a dissatisfied Manhattan housewife hires a stranger to babysit and ends up getting much more than she bargained for.
AFTER: I made a joke on Twitter the other day about stress dreams I was having, in which I was back at my old job circa 1989, and I said that I expected my ex-wife to turn up any night now. That turned out to be prophetic, and I suppose it was a combination of "Liberal Arts" and today's film that triggered it. (Joking about it probably didn't help either.). In "Liberal Arts" a thirty-something man goes back to visit his old college, and "Tallulah" depicts a woman who lives in some form of NYU campus-sponsored housing, because her husband is/was a professor there, only they're separated, and he now lives with his boyfriend. The apartment she lives in is on Fifth Avenue between 9th and 10th Streets, just a few blocks north of Washington Square Park, and just one block south of the Rubin Hall dorm, where I frequently ate while at NYU. My dorm was two blocks away, but didn't have a dining hall.
So, put all that together - NYU, someone going back to college, a character whose spouse came out of the closet - and it was kind of inevitable. Plus I fell asleep in the recliner, and that's where I get the best sleep, but also the most vivid dreams. In last night's dream I was attending some kind of college reunion, in some giant open-air banquet hall, and there were a ton of people there. I tried to work things out so my wife and I could sit at a table that was filling up, but I couldn't prevent what then started to happen - my ex-wife arrived at the table and focused on me, and I realized she'd be sitting down at the same table as us. Suddenly I couldn't remember anybody's name and I had to make introductions around the table, so I was in panic mode, and...well, that's it, that's when I woke up from the sheer terror of it all. It's a bit hard to explain, but I think I'd prefer a dream where I was being chased by a demon or on a plane that's about to crash. As a result I had dry heaves for half an hour, and I couldn't eat lunch today.
But let's put my baggage back in the overhead compartment and get on with "Tallulah". The film centers on a woman who's a drifter and lives in her van, and like yesterday's film, it starts with something of a break-up. Her boyfriend expresses a desire to return home, whatever that means, and the next morning, he's gone. This leads Tallulah, or "Lu", to sift through a stack of stolen credit cards and start driving toward New York City. We don't know who she's there to visit at first, but it turns out to be her boyfriend Nico's mother, Margo, who wants nothing to do with Lu or her son, and refuses to give out any money or help.
Then, while wandering through a hotel and eating scraps from the room service trays on the floor, Tallulah gets mistaken for a hotel employee, and a guest hires her to watch her baby for the day while she meets with a man across town to have an affair. At first this is just an opportunity to make a quick $100, but when Lu determines that the infant girl is unwanted and mostly neglected by her mother, she takes the baby with her after the woman returns and passes out. This leads her to use the baby to get closer to her boyfriend's mother, by lying and saying that it's her child and Nico is the father, making Margo feel obligated to welcome them in to her apartment.
Margo and Tallulah are designed to be an odd pairing, that's a classic trope, seen most recently in "Stuber", "Spies in Disguise" and such - they're polar opposites. One's a young woman with no home, no family, and a loose definition of morality, while the other is older with a fixed residence, a family that she's tried to hold on too tightly to, and a strong moral center. So over the next few days they butt heads, challenge each other, but also each gains insight into the other's world, and in the end they sort of bond and maybe become a little bit like each other. Sure, it's formulaic, but it's been proven to work again and again in the movie world. They've each supposedly got the best interests of baby Maggie at heart, but that could all be jeopardized when Margo learns that Maggie is really Maddie, and not really her grand-child.
There are a few contrivances where Tallulah has to dispose of the daily newspapers, or distract Margo when news about the "hotel baby snatcher" airs on TV. And it's a little odd that nobody out on the streets of New York recognizes her, with all the media attention devoted to the case. Finally it's a dinner with Nico's father and his boyfriend that leads to somebody tipping off the police about the location of the missing baby - otherwise it seems that New York's Finest didn't really have a clue about how to proceed in this case. So NITPICK POINT: continually interviewing the baby's mother is less likely to produce any leads than good old-fashioned detective work might. Why not show some cops out there on patrol, casing playgrounds and stores that sell baby supplies?
I'm also wondering how this film managed to pull off the trick of making a character who kidnaps a baby sympathetic, which seems like a real feat of screenplay engineering. Was this to fulfill a challenge that one writer issued to another? Or an attempt to get inside the head of a real person who did this, or something similar? Ah, a little research on Wikipedia tells me that the film's writer/director, Sian Heder, worked as a babysitter in a Los Angeles hotel, and one time she was required to look after a girl whose mother had come to the hotel to have an affair. Afterwards, Heder thought that maybe she should have taken the child away from her mother.
This also finally confirms for me my theory about "Netflix Original" films - they're allowed to remain on the service much longer than other films, which seem to mostly have a term of two years. This makes sense, if Netflix financed the film or bought the rights to be its sole streaming provider, why not keep the film around to maximize their investment?
The biggest problem may be that there's no real ending here, by that I mean that the film stops, but there's no real resolution. We may assume that Margo will fight for Tallulah in a legal sense, having been transformed somewhat by bonding with her, even if that relationship was founded on lies. But then there's something of a quandary there, because Margo was portrayed as someone who had a hard time with letting go - so wouldn't it display more personal growth if she let Tallulah leave her life, rather than stand by her? Or has she learned to find some personal balance in holding on to others, but not too tightly?
Also starring Ellen Page (last seen in "Hard Candy"), Tammy Blanchard (last seen in "Rabbit Hole"), Evan Jonigkeit (last seen in "Whiskey Tango Foxtrot"), David Zayas (last seen in "The Interpreter"), John Benjamin Hickey (last seen in "Hostiles"), Zachary Quinto (last seen in "What's Your Number?"), Uzo Aduba (last seen in "Alvin and the Chipmunks: The Road Chip"), Fredric Lehne (last seen in "The Greatest Showman"), Felix Solis, Maddie Corman (last seen in "Morning Glory"), Evangeline Ellis, Liliana Ellis, Eden Marryshow, Jason Tottenham.
RATING: 5 out of 10 "freegan" meals
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