“Tallulah,” a sludgy kidnapping drama that manages to be hopelessly contrived and hopelessly boring at the same time, marks yet another failed effort by Ellen Page to rekindle the heat she had after “Juno.” I’m mystified why Netflix (instead of, say, Lifetime) wanted the movie, for which it reportedly paid $5 million for streaming rights alone.
The title character is a free-living vagabond whose boyfriend ditches her after she starts talking about having a baby. So she makes her way to Manhattan to try to cadge some money from his rich mom (Allison Janney) then wanders into the Warwick Hotel, where a frazzled alcoholic matron (Tammy Blanchard) inexplicably mistakes her for a chambermaid, inexplicably invites her into her room, inexplicably shares her life story and leaves her 1-year-old daughter in Tallulah’s care.
Tallulah becomes attached to the child and walks out the door while Mom is sleeping off a binge. Tallulah then shows up again at the Janney character’s mammoth 5th Avenue apartment, telling the woman that the baby is her child, hence Janney’s granddaughter. Female bonding ensues– they’re both lost souls, Janney’s husband having left when he discovered he was gay — and despite being a professorial type and an author, the older woman doesn’t suspect much of anything.
If a rich white baby were kidnapped from the Warwick Hotel, the story would, of course, blanket the news, but nobody in the movie ever turns on the TV or pays much attention to the newspaper. But the main problem with the movie is that Tallulah, who is meant to be roguishly charming, is instead irritating — a lying, thieving, tiresome, unwashed hippie moocher even before she turns kidnapper.
The movie is interminable — scene after scene after scene returns to check in on the Blanchard character’s screamy drunken hysteria — and yet leaves a subplot hanging and ends without much resolution, instead opting for a second iteration of a hokey fantasy scene. At least there is one laugh in the film: when the Janney character catches Tallulah throwing out the newspapers, Janney says, “It’s the New York Times.” Instead she hands over a copy of the Daily News to be disposed of: “This,” she says, “is trash.”