Shocking: Amy Adams’ Flop Era Continues

What Will It Take To Get Amy Adams Out of Her Flop Era? Probably Not ‘Nightbitch’

Everyone gets their flop era. Sometimes, life doesn’t go your way, and when it happens on a huge public platform, your professional struggles seem to take on the weight of cultural importance. For every And Justice For All, there’s a Saint Anger. Oscar winners get Razzie noms. World Cup victors stumble in the heats. Still, nobody likes it when their favourites seem forever stuck in a rut of creative failures, especially when they become somewhat incomprehensible or even irritating. We Amy Adams fans know the pain all too well, and it doesn’t feel like we’re out of the woods just yet.

Adams, a six-time Oscar nominee and industry-beloved actress, doesn’t need my defences. She’s a versatile performer who has done drama, comedy, musical, action, and sci-fi. She’s worked with Spielberg, Villeneuve, PTA, and Mike Nichols. She did both The Master AND The Muppets. It’s always felt like a matter of ‘when, not if’ in regards to her becoming an Oscar winner. But these past few years of Adams films have been, well, a bit rough. My theory is that it started when Adams didn’t get an Oscar nomination for Best Actress for Arrival.

Denis Villeneuve’s achingly humane sci-fi drama isn’t just one of her best films; it’s her greatest performance by a country mile. As Louise, a linguist tasked with finding a means of communication with an alien species, she is at her most tender and tenacious. As an actress, Adams’ greatest skill is her deceptive strength. She seems so sweet and approachable, very Girl Next Door, and that allows her the ability to sneak in moments of grit and devastation at unexpected times. Consider The Master, where she plays the wife of a cult leader, who mimics the expected part of the supportive spouse but slowly reveals her truth as the real power player behind the operation.

With Arrival, she is wholly believable as the one human out of seven billion who is empathetic, intelligent, and sceptical enough to do what nobody else can. So, of course she didn’t get an Oscar nomination! Of course it was too good for the Academy in a year where they had to make room for yet another iffy late-era Meryl Streep performance. After that, the films just got kind of bad. You can understand why Adams chose them: chances to work with acclaimed directors on buzzy material that felt like a shoo-in for a return to the podium.

The results, however, were mostly DOA. Yes, she got nominated for Vice, for the thankless role of Lynne Cheney in a very bad and smug biopic, but it felt more like a courtesy nod than a celebratory one. Dear Evan Hansen was a mess. The Woman in the Window, endlessly delayed and shunted onto streaming, could have been camp fun but took itself far too seriously. Hillbilly Elegy was an unmitigated disaster for both culture and democracy, and also contained what is easily Adams’ worst performance.

A Missed Opportunity

Nightbitch, her latest release and a film I enjoyed, is a frustrating experience. In an adaptation of Rachel Yoder’s novel, Adams plays the nameless Mother, a stay-at-home parent who is finding the repetition of daily life suffocating. She is desperate for something more, but the film’s script is too weak to provide it. The result is a character who feels more like a cipher than a fully fleshed-out person.

The film gets some things right about the Mother, capturing the sense of desperation and isolation that can come with being a stay-at-home parent. It also gets some things wrong, portraying her as more passive and reactive than proactive. The script is too thin, and the direction is too heavy-handed, to really explore the complexities of the character.

Comparing Notes: Willem Dafoe’s Inside

A Different Kind of Solo Performance

My reaction for first reading the synopsis for Inside was basically that Vince McMahon meme in which he goes through sequential stages of ever-increasing excitement: ‘It’s Willem Dafoe!’ ‘He plays an art thief!’ ‘He undertakes a solo heist set in a luxury penthouse flat!’ ‘The heist goes wrong!’ ‘He gets trapped in there by himself and has to use his wits and cunning to survive!’ There are those special actors that can make pretty much anything compelling. Point a camera at them and you’re guaranteed a good time. Willem Dafoe is unquestionably one of those performers, a person with magnificent natural features and physicality that are matched by the refined skill he brings to everything he stars in.

Inside, the debut feature from director Vasilis Katsoupis, belongs to that cohort of films that isolate an actor somewhere and lets us watch them do their thing. Sometimes these movies work excellently (Moon), sometimes well (Castaway, Locke), but they always run the risk of coming across as gimmicky, flirting with ego exercise, and unable to sustain their premise (Buried, 127 Hours).

The Limits of Isolation

Unfortunately, despite choosing one of the best possible candidates for the format, Inside fails more than it succeeds. It is not a bad film per se, but if it wasn’t for the overwhelming magnetism of Dafoe, I’d likely have found my attention wandering and checking out altogether.

We open with a montage of the cold, cavernous space that Dafoe and the audience will soon be trapped in, all steel gray and hard angles, sterile; an exhibit in and of itself, rather than a place a human being could call home. Fitting, I suppose, as for Dafoe’s thief, Nemo, it’s about to become a particularly punishing prison.

To ruthlessly look for ‘logic’ and ‘plot holes’ is to rob yourself of joy and to misunderstand the whole point of fiction, yet nevertheless sometimes things do just jump out at you. When things first go wrong for Nemo, the penthouse’s alarm system goes berserk. He manages to shut it off eventually, but for a not inconsiderable amount of time, it’s the audiovisual equivalent of a mid-sized fireworks display being set off on the top floor of this building.

A Study in Contrast

Inside and Nightbitch are two films that, on the surface, have very little in common. One is a tense, claustrophobic thriller, while the other is a more cerebral, character-driven drama. But they do share one thing in common: they both feature performers who are capable of carrying a film on their own.

Adams brings a level of depth and nuance to Nightbitch that is sadly lacking in the script. She is a performer who is always looking for ways to deepen her characters, to find the humanity in them, and to bring them to life in a way that feels authentic and real. Dafoe, on the other hand, is a performer who is always looking for ways to push himself, to take risks, and to challenge his audience.

These two films say something about the importance of strong scripts and direction. Without them, even the most talented performers can struggle to make an impact. With them, even the most flawed films can be elevated and transformed into something truly special.