Amy Adams Elevates Nightbitch From Preachy to Powerful
A dark comedy about motherhood, whose visceral delights are chewed up by its rambling approach.
Amy Adams is never given a name in Marielle Heller’s Nightbitch. The former New York City artist turned stay-at-home mom is simply credited as “Mother,” a fitting moniker since motherhood has become her identity, for better or worse. Her son is a toddler, though not quite preschool aged, so they remain joined at the hip at all times in their suburban town. When out and about, she fields enthusiastic questions about her new role with a polite smile. In an early scene, she imagines answering an acquaintance with brutal, piercing honesty about unfair expectations and how she's left with little time to herself, before the film doubles back to her polite white lie. When asked if she enjoys being home all the time, she replies “Yeah, I do. I love it,” through gritted teeth. It seems like a light in her eyes has been extinguished.
Heller's montage approach to detailing each day makes Adams’ routine feel even more mechanical and oppressive. She doesn't hate being a mother, the film makes clear; her son is a chaotic bundle of joy. What she hates is everything motherhood entails in this specific form, from having to compromise her career to spending time with other moms at library book readings for their kids while she dons a mask of contentment. She hates that motherhood has become the sum total of who she is, at the cost of who she was, and wants to be.
She also wearily accepts the changes to her body, which Adams mentions in voiceover, and which her son playfully points out. “Mama fuzzy!” he says, while riding on her back, leading to a bathroom mirror inspection where she finds much more lower back hair than usual, as well as a curious bump on her tailbone.
Although this discovery dovetails into the movie’s central premise (taken straight from Rachel Yoder's book of the same name), the advertised element of a woman transforming into a dog is more of a flourish of magical realism than an eerie genre trapping. However, it most certainly shares its DNA with sci-fi and monster horror. Its relationship to the literal is never explained or expounded upon, but this tethers the conceit directly to the character's state of mind and body, making it a deft externalization of her anxieties. Her heightened sense of smell, her weight gain, and the stray hairs she spots on her chin are all hormonal, postpartum symptoms that the movie cheekily likens to a werewolf transformation first brought about when a trio of dogs mysteriously approaches her. Gradually, she goes on night runs alongside them and transforms into a husky retriever, re-framing her bodily metamorphosis as a kind of liberation.
The freeing nature of these changes goes hand-in-hand with her extracting a more feral kind of enjoyment from motherhood. She begins playfully engaging in dog-like activities with her son: snarling at each other and eating food without utensils in public, even if it means drawing disgusted glares. This also leads to cloying concern from her husband (a well-meaning but naïvely demanding Scoot McNairy), who's never present enough to know what her day entails.
However, as this marital tension brews, and Adams' character begins expressing her self-discoveries to fellow moms, Heller seems to scale back on the more instinctive and sensory elements of her film, leaving the actual transformations and emancipating night runs few and far between. Where Heller’s The Diary of a Teenage Girl portrayed imaginative conceptions of adolescence, and her A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood made intimate moments feel vast and sprawling, Nightbitch favors a more verbose approach to explaining its themes, making it one of Heller's least visually accomplished works. Its manifesto on societal double-standards could have gone hand-in-hand with its occasionally visceral personification of themes like motherhood, desire, and autonomy, but the movie scales back on the experiential and swaps it for a more logistical approach to what is, essentially, a fantastical allegory. Nightbitch ends up less of an emotional ride and more of an explanatory screed against social mores. It becomes more thought and spoken than intrinsically felt, but everything on the tip of the movie’s tongue is already covered by Adams’ performance.
Nightbitch would fail if not for Amy Adams.
The actress remains the film's saving grace, even when it falters, often thanks to her very presence. Weight loss and weight gain are far too often touted as "award worthy" during Oscar PR cycles, though this is more often applied to male actors (the last time a woman was the topic of such conversation was Charlize Theron for Monster in 2003). However, Adams’ weight gain for Nightbitch is a vital part of the movie's meta-text without being framed as spectacle. In casting an actress audiences are used to seeing as leaner, an immediate association is formed when her character begins reminiscing about her figure, and lamenting that she may never look the way she once did before becoming a mom.
The film also places equal dramatic weight on the character's lost artistic desires and her fears that she may have even lost any intellectual edge she once had. Rather than tragic or pitiful, à la The Whale, her body is simply a matter-of-fact element of the film. Her changes, while highly personal, are framed as routine, making the movie instantly, broadly relatable. That the character is frequently exhausted isn't down to one specific change, but is itself a change. It's a new status quo and a new state of being to which she must adjust, especially when faced with the reality that one of her grad school friends has dealt with the transition to motherhood in more idyllic ways (leading to a delightfully funny feral outburst).
Women in physically vulnerable roles are often called “fearless” for letting the camera gawk at their bodies, but Heller's matter-of-fact approach ensures Adams' essential bravery comes down to a more holistic embodiment of character and theme. It's a wonderful performance, and Adams sells even the movie’s most inelegant and expository dialogue as though it were emanating from deep within, as she stands on the precipice of both breakthrough and breakdown. In the process, she elevates Nightbitch. Rather than a film that merely discusses the subject of empowerment — which it does often, and at length — Adams makes it feel empowering by capturing, through her body language and quiet moments, the fragility and frustration of motherhood, before forcing them to scab over into affirming fury.
