TALLULAH (NETFLIX)

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Vagabond Tallulah (Page) lives out of her van and drifts from city to city with no ties to anyone or anything, except her boyfriend, Nico (Evan Jonigkeit), and that’s just the way she likes it. When Nico surprises her one night by suggesting they go back to his hometown in New York and maybe settle down or start a family, she flips out. The next morning Nico is gone, and a penniless Tallulah, who goes by “Lu,” makes her way to New York City anyway and barges into the fancy apartment building of Nico’s mother, Margo (Janney).

Dealing with issues of her own — stemming from Nico’s two-year long absence and her ex-husband (John Benjamin Hickey) coming out of the closet and asking for a divorce — Margo slams her door in Lu’s face, despite the young woman’s connection to her missing son. Wandering into a swanky hotel to scavenge for room service scraps, Lu is mistaken for a maid by spacy trophy wife Carolyn (Blanchard), who is desperately looking for anyone to babysit her 1-year-old daughter, Madison (Evangeline and Liliana Ellis), while she tries to score an extramarital hook-up.

Seduced partly by the wads of cash and jewelry Carolyn leaves lying around, and partly by Madison’s obvious need for a responsible caretaker (the toddler roams around diaper-less, peering out the balcony window and grabbing at bottles of beer), Lu stays and Carolyn bolts. When a drunk and defeated Carolyn returns hours later and promptly passes out on the bed, Lu can’t bring herself to leave a wailing Madison alone and makes a rash decision to bring her into the van overnight.

The next morning Carolyn wakes up in a panic and by the time Lu arrives to hand Madison over, the police are already on the scene and Lu makes another rash decision to take off with Madison in tow. With nowhere else to go, she winds up back on Margo’s doorstep — this time telling her Madison is Nico’s child. Margo reluctantly lets Lu into her home, and even more reluctantly into her life. Meanwhile, Carolyn hopes to prevent her husband (Fredric Lehne) from finding out what happened, which makes both the lead detective (David Zayas) and child protection agent (Uzo Aduba) assigned to the case dubious of her motives.

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Tallulah Finds Depth in the Melodrama of Motherhood

[size=1.11111]Netflix’s new indie film, starring Ellen Page and Allison Janney, tells the story of an impulsive baby kidnapping and the surprising connections that result.

A homeless young drifter, feeling lost after breaking up with her boyfriend, steals a baby from a negligent, rich housewife, triggering a police manhunt. A successful academic, still haunted by her husband’s decision to leave her for a man, gets swept up in the drama when the baby shows up on her doorstep, with its kidnapper claiming it’s her granddaughter. Tallulah, which premiered on Netflix this weekend, has the melodramatic premise of a Lifetime original movie, but it stands out thanks to the graceful, thoughtful characterization of its three protagonists, despite their potential to be monstrous caricatures.

Tallulah is occasionally hampered by its high-stakes plot—any film that starts with a baby kidnapping will have the audience on edge until that’s resolved. But it leverages this crazy decision, made by its free-spirited title character (played by an appropriately crust-punk Ellen Page), to instead tell three very different stories of motherhood that avoid obvious clichés. At its heart,Tallulah is about three women who think themselves unfit for parenthood for wildly different reasons, and while writer-director Sian Heder is unafraid to explore their many flaws, she fortunately refrains from passing judgment or drawing simplistic, moralizing conclusions.

Page’s Tallulah is a living plot device, an infinitely resourceful charmer who sleeps in her van and has convinced her boyfriend Nico (Evan Jonigkeit) to follow her around the country for two years. As the film begins, their relationship falls apart, and Tallulah finds herself in New York, stealing from fancy hotel rooms while posing as a housekeeper. There, she meets Carolyn (Tammy Blanchard), a permanently wasted socialite who seems obviously neglectful of her one-year-old daughter; in a moment of vigilante justice, Tallulah snatches the baby and begins pretending it’s her daughter.

Read more: http://www.theatlantic.com/enter ... ulah-review/493874/