Tallulah is a 2016 drama about a young woman desperate to be rid of her toddler who hires a stranger to babysit and ends up getting much more than she bargained for.
Ellen Page sort of burst on the scene in 2007’s Juno, even though she’d already begun to turn some heads in the divisive Hard Candy two years earlier and a string of television appearance dating back to the late 90s a child. Playing a pregnant teen in Juno, she won a lot of attention for her quirky but grounded approach, creating a character that still resonates with many more than a decade on. Since then, she’s found a lot of success in big budget titles, including the Christopher Nolan mindbender Inception and the rebooted Flatliners.
In 2016, she starred in a Netflix original film called Tallulah, a drama co-starring the recent Academy Award-winning Allison Janney. It’s about a young woman named Tallulah (Page), who is homeless, living in a rundown van with her boyfriend Nico (Evan Jonigkeit), who has, until then, enjoyed their open-road style of living but thinks it’s time to head back to NYC and start a new life. She thinks opposite and in the morning, he’s gone. Terrified of being alone, she drives the van to the city in search of Nico, finding his mother Margo (Janney) and begs for help, though is rejected as she hasn’t seen her son in several years.
Desperate, Tallulah heads to a ritzy hotel and scurries about the halls, scrounging for food from used room service trays. She’s spotted by a wealthy woman named Carolyn (Tammy Blanchard), who mistakes the frazzled girl for housekeeping and makes an odd request: look after her seemingly neglected toddler while she sneaks away and cheats on her husband. Seems reasonable. Seeing plenty of cash lying about the room, Tallulah accepts, and once alone, schemes a plan that will have terrible impact on all three women.
As I mentioned in my original review of the film, this is really about the entanglements of all three leads, the film sort of set in three acts that share their stories. Tallulah is the bridge between them making choices that affect each in desperately trying ways. Page has this inescapable vulnerability to her in just about all her roles, making it almost impossible for the audience not to side with whatever her characters are fallen into, and here, it fits like a glove. The opening salvo that rightfully flip the seeming joys of off the grid homelessness into chaotic lonely fear are gripping, Page corralling a host of emotions into these moments that give it some defining weight. There’s a terrific arch in the story of Tallulah that isn’t all what you might expect, given her start.
I don’t want to take away from the great work of both Janney and Blanchard, both of whom deserve attention for what they offer as well, yet for the sake of this post, I really want to focus on the small details Page brings to the titular character. This is not a bombastic portrayal in histrionics, rather one built on subtleties, something that writer/director Sian Heder manages to find intelligent balance with, as Tallulah is a character naturally open to over-exposure and prone to possible moments of contrived manipulation. Fortunately, even as the movie doesn’t handle its few male characters with the same depth or care, this carries the story right to its end, our investment with her and the women she influences intact and sustained all the way through. Highly-recommended viewing.