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Thursday, May 10, 2018
The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com
ARTS

‘Tully’ is fresh

Caitlyn Smith discusses 
her music career, album 

FILM REVIEW

“This album 
was the end of 
a long, winding 

road.”

MUSIC INTERVIEW

When the next big thing is in 

front of you, you sit up and take 
notice. That’s the effect Cait-
lyn Smith has on a room: She 
demands your undivided atten-
tion. While she may not be a 
household name yet, her show at 
The Blind Pig on May 3 had the 
distinct feel of a rising star — the 
kind of grungy, small-venue per-
formance you brag about having 
seen a year later when the artist is 
all over the radio.

Smith is already the biggest 

name you’ve never heard in the 
music industry. Her origin story 
fits neatly into the mythology of 
the all-American country singer: 
Raised in a small town in Min-
nesota, Smith started performing 
in the Twin Cities before mov-
ing to Nashville, where she built 
a career as a songwriter. Some 
of her songs were picked up by 
major recording artists, including 
Kenny Rogers and Dolly Parton 
(“You Can’t Make Old Friends”), 
Rascal Flatts (“Let it Hurt”), Lady 
Antebellum (“747”), James Bay 
(“Hear Your Heart”) and Meghan 
Trainor and John Legend (“Like 
I’m Gonna Lose You”). Smith 
struggled to establish herself as a 
performer in her own right until 
Starfire, her breakout release this 
January from Monument Records 
for which she is currently touring.

“This album was the end of a 

long, winding road. I went around 
to every label in Nashville and 
tried writing for radio and tried 
writing what I thought other peo-
ple wanted from me. Finally, after 
years of hearing ‘no’ from record 
labels and ‘no’ from most of Nash-
ville, that’s what brought me to 

creating Starfire,” said Smith in a 
phone interview with the Michi-
gan Daily. “I stepped back and I 
thought, you know what, I can 
write songs that are my story and 
not think about genre, not think 
about radio, not think about any-
thing except making music that I 
love.”

The tracks on Starfire tend 

toward 
confessional, 
drawing 

from Smith’s Minnesota roots 
and the hustle of trying to make a 
name for herself in Nashville. For 
Smith, the freedom to be more 
vulnerable and personal in her 
songwriting was an important 
reason for the shift towards per-
forming her own songs: “When 
you go in the room to write for an 
artist or for a specific project, it’s 

a little bit more like work. You’re 
able to dig around in what the art-
ist is thinking, but not necessar-
ily tell your story. You can play a 
character in a room, but it’s not 
as personal. When I’m writing 
for myself I’m digging around my 
own heart and my own story and 
my own truth and trying to write 
that.”

The intimacy of these songs is 

always evocative and occasion-
ally heartbreakingly raw like in 
“This Town Is Killing Me,” a song 
about Smith’s struggles in Nash-
ville with the lyrics, “Nashville, 
you win / Your steel guitars and 
broken hearts have done me in / 
I gave you my soul / I wanted it 

so bad and now I just wanna go 
home / This town is killing me, 
this town is killing me.”

Smith covers a lot of ground in 

Starfire, both in terms of emotion-
al range and genre. As much as 
she can access vulnerability and 
grief, Smith is also able to pump 
out brighter, brassier tracks like 
“Contact High” and “Before You 
Call Me Baby” that wouldn’t be 
out of place on the Top 40 charts. 
While the album holds a country 
backbone, Smith includes pop-
inflected hooks and elements of 
blues and rock, making her style 
difficult to pigeonhole.

Despite this variety, Smith’s 

songs show off her meticulously 
honed instinct for songwriting 
— unsurprising, since she consid-
ers herself “a student of songs” 
and cites singer-songwriters like 
Carole King, Paul Simon and 
Patty Griffin as some of her big-
gest influences. Smith identifies a 
common thread in her work: “All 
the songs have some guts! Even 
on the more fun songs, I still feel 
it from my toes.” With Smith’s 
powerhouse vocals and take-no-
prisoners confidence, it’s easy to 
see how gutsiness could be her 
calling card.

After finishing the Starfire 

tour, Smith will go on the road 
with country legends Faith Hill 
and Tim McGraw, and then with 
Sheryl Crow. She says, “2018 is 
about getting this music out to 
the fans. And then anytime I’m 
in Nashville and have a few days 
off I’ll definitely be writing and 
making some new stuff up for the 
next record.” Whatever that next 
record may be, there’s no denying 
that Caitlyn Smith is on the rise, 
and she’s taking all of us along for 
the ride.

JULIA MOSS
Daily Arts Writer

What does modern motherhood 

look like? The spectrum of cinematic 
depictions of what it means to be a 
mother is seemingly endless, ranging 
from lighthearted, surface-level por-
trayals of mothers in “Freaky Friday” 
and “Mean Girls” to far darker depic-
tions of mothers acting ‘un-motherly’ 
in “Carrie” and “Ordinary People.” 
Despite the variation in genre, what 
all these films have in common is that 
their portrayals of moth-
erhood are over-exag-
gerated and unrealistic. 
When it comes to inter-
preting 
motherhood, 

the film world turns to 
using a phony lens rather than show-
ing the grittier and occasionally less-
pleasant truth of the stresses and 
anxieties that mothers actually expe-
rience. Void of unnecessary fluff and 
over-dramatization, Jason Reitman’s 
film “Tully” offers audiences a fresh 
and sobering glimpse into the rarely 
revealed side of modern-day mother-
hood and its overshadowed intersec-
tion with mental health, challenging 
the unfair standards that expect con-
stant stability and overall perfection 
from mothers.

Marlo (Charlize Theron, “Mad 

Max: Fury Road”), a mother of 
two elementary-aged kids and a 
newborn baby, is far beyond her 
breaking point. Life has become 
a merry-go-round, but instead of 
spinning around and around among 
colorful animals and smiling faces, 
Marlo is rotating through the same 
numbing routine that mainly consists 
of changing diapers, breastfeeding 
and prepping microwave dinners. In 
a state of perpetual sleeplessness and 
with minimal aid from her loving 
yet ridiculously unhelpful husband 
Drew, (Ron Livingston, “The Con-
juring”) Marlo is running on empty, 
heading toward a downward mental 
spiral. However, a beacon of light 
shines down when, eager to revive 
his sister’s spirits, Marlo’s wealthy 
brother Craig (Mark Duplass, “Safety 
Not Guaranteed”) offers an unusual 
baby-shower gift: a night nurse.

Desperate for a sliver of R&R, 

Marlo takes her brother up on his 
offer, quickly finding herself face-to-
face with the youthful, enviable and 
illustrious Tully (Mackenzie Davis, 
“Blade Runner 2049”). Despite 
Tully’s initial purpose of simply car-
ing for the baby through the night, 
her late-night house calls gradu-
ally evolve into gossip-filled eve-

nings with Marlo. As the friendship 
between the two women grows, their 
bizarre, almost sister-like chemistry 
strengthens and, invigorated by Tul-
ly’s free-spirit and zest, Marlo slowly 
emerges from her state of emotional 
blankness and depression.

Through her character’s feelings 

of self-doubt, numbness and inner 
and outer exhaustion, Theron bril-
liantly delivers the powerful message 
that motherhood is multifaceted. 
While, in part, it is unconditional 
love, joy and relentless devotion, it 

can also lead to a loss of 
identity and emotional 
deterioration. 
Mar-

lo’s unsweetened and 
uncensored moments as 
a mother create the tone 

of realness that persists throughout 
the movie.

Arguably 
most 
commendable 

about “Tully” is its boldness in tack-
ling the theme of mental health, 
a topic seldom explored in adult 
characters. Throughout the film, as 
audience members, it is clear that 
Marlo is experiencing some form of 
postpartum depression and severe, 
debilitating insomnia. Yet, the other 
characters in the film, Marlo’s hus-
band included, are oblivious to her 
struggles. This oblivion speaks more 
broadly to the manner in which, until 
fairly recently, mental health, espe-
cially postpartum depression, was 
often unacknowledged as legitimate 
or relevant by society. Still today 
there exists a skewed and ancient 
notion that mental health can be 
boxed up and designated to fit a spe-
cific type of person, which simply is 
not true. Through the presentation 
of Marlo, a thirty-something mother 
and a character that viewers would 
not expect to be suffering from 
depression, “Tully” overturns the 
false assumptions that there is a mold 
of any sort for what mental health 
‘should’ look like.

More than anything else, “Tully” 

is a film that aims to enlighten. 
Reitman re-evaluates the notion of 
motherhood from a more human-
istic perspective, tearing down the 
implicit and outdated stereotypical 
standards that expect expert child-
care, relentless positivity and endless 
smiles from mothers. With Mother’s 
Day fast approaching, “Tully” takes 
an unconventional route, exposing 
the reality of motherhood’s tribula-
tions, honoring all mothers by chal-
lenging the illusion of ‘the perfect 
mother’ and beautifully shattering 
the misconception that there is a way 
that mothers are supposed to be.

SAMANTHA NELSON

Daily Arts Writer

“Tully”

Focus Features

State Theatre

