Editor’s Note: Vanyaland film editor Nick Johnston is in Canada all week covering the 2024 Toronto International Film Festival. And as usual, we wish we were up there with him! Check out our continuing TIFF 2024 coverage, read our official preview, and revisit our complete archives of prior editions.
Perhaps the most frustrating trend of “intellectual” populist cinema trickling down from the most prominent Hollywood hits of the ‘10s is that it frequently mistakes myopia for mass appeal. For every Jordan Peele, who can nail both the specific and the general in a way that doesn’t patronize or exclude audiences while also directly reaching the specific crowd the film is intended to speak to, there are three or four filmmakers making movies like Marielle Heller’s Nightbitch. Heller’s a fantastic studio filmmaker who makes uncommonly empathetic movies about loaded subjects – her adaptation of The Diary of a Teenage Girl wrung great drama out of the liminal space between the maturity Bel Powey’s protagonist assumed she had and her actual age, Can You Ever Forgive Me? turned Lee Israel’s forgeries into a deeply relatable study of failed ambition, and A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood examined modern-day sainthood with skepticism until it became clear that its central character, Fred Rogers, was as good as everyone assumed and said he was. That last movie is especially important as, though grace had always been a key feature of Heller’s filmography, it extended its strange mercies directly to the audience, with Tom Hanks directly asking us to remember someone who we loved – cracking the third wall at the same time he was breaking down the heart’s defenses. Nightbitch attempts to do the same for motherhood, but in its attempts to make its lead a stand-in for dispossessed matriarchs across the land, it makes some leaps in logic that are hard to reconcile.
As far as the film’s entertainment value is concerned, Heller’s made another ferociously funny and well-cast dramedy, grounded in a fantastic performance from Amy Adams in the lead role. However, the problems appear once you realize that Adams’s character – a highly specific collection of unique character traits in a relatively uncommon modern circumstance — is never named. She is known as “Mother,” and her spouse, played by Scoot McNairy, is “Mother’s Husband,” a hangover from the literary stylings of its source material, Rachel Yoder’s 2021 novel. I’m assuming that this is an alternate history tale in which Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique was never published but second-and-third wave feminism expanded in similar ways, as the movie seems to assume that there wasn’t a grand shift away from domesticity in favor of a woman’s independence and ability to have a fulfilling life not dictated by the rhythms of childcare. It’s not uncommon, as stay-at-home moms still exist, but it feels weird as applied here: Mother was once a talented visual artist who made installations and exhibits before giving it all up to spend her days tending to her toddler son. Dad’s being sent all across the country for work, and it is understandably taxing on her psyche to be stuck at home, in permanent caregiver mode, watching her identity become subsumed under the moniker. At a certain point, she is just “Mother,” and she’s mourning for the person she was before she gained this responsibility.
Adams’ ambivalence about her circumstances is intelligently played for laughs, especially as the film strides to its grand metaphor: She is lycanthrope-lite, slowly transforming into a dog, the unhinged wild nature of the stray calling to her. There are hints that this isn’t just imagination, with her Mennonite (I believe this is right, but I might be wrong) upbringing having a flair of German mysticism to it: Her mother’s disappearances in childhood start to take on a wholly new meaning, Perhaps this yearning is hereditary, her birthright. She wants nothing more than to run free with the rest of the pack, and she gets it: Murdering rabbits left and right, digging holes, and shitting in front yards, fully endowed with the anarchic freedom of the formerly domesticated. This is an important, if understated, detail: The dogs she runs wild with aren’t mutts; they’re purebreds who fled their lives as housepets to become echoes of the wild wolves they once were. To her husband’s chagrin, Mother starts taking this newfound identification with the canine as parenting advice, as if Dr. Phil’s We’ve Got Issues had a whole chapter on the benefits of letting your child eat out of dog bowls and how sleeping in fluffy Frenchie-sized beds is a great way to get your needy baby off of your bed and independent. But she slowly starts cracking up in more outré and public ways – for instance, she discovers she can’t stomach kale when grabbing a bite with her artist friends from grad school, barking at them as she runs to the exits with a stolen lambchop – and decides to reclaim her identity, at whatever cost, to silence the howling within her soul.
This angst is understandable – postpartum realities are very, very different than what one might imagine in the moment, and that sense of buyer’s remorse for the life you mortgaged is not exclusive to parents – but Heller’s never quite able to reconcile the modern nature of her setting or her character in a way that makes it thematically resonant. This isn’t the ‘50s or ‘60s, an era in which society was wholly structured around keeping women isolated in sterile kitchens with children tugging at their skirts – it’s the present day, after all, and it was Adams’ idea in the first place to stay at home with her child. McNairy’s character is the one forced to go through a redemption arc, as he stops being a shithead sitcom dad and grows to support and care for his partner, though not without a divorce being threatened and a lengthy separation. His crime was that he didn’t push back against Adams’ idea, as well as one or two harsh words in the minutiae of a fight, which is a wonderful way of brushing off the protagonist’s core conflict without interrogating her own choices. It’s a movie desperately in search of someone to blame, and the counterexamples – illustrated by a colleague who does have it all, in the form of a nanny who can watch over her child while continuing the pursuit of her artistic dreams – make it all the more difficult to reconcile. It isn’t a financial issue — McNairy can afford the rent on an apartment during their separation, as well as the mortgage on their (large) suburban home, without any seeming strain on the family finances – it’s an issue of an imaginary scenario concocted within the protagonist’s head running aground on the dismal shores of reality.
Again, Adams’ commitment to the messiness of the role, body horror and all, is fabulous, and there’s no moment in which she looks at the screen, Leo-in-The-Revenant style, and just says, “Now give me my fucking Oscar already.” She’s fully immersed in the character, game for whatever Heller throws at her, and they make a lot of bitterly funny magic together when delving into Mother’s darkest thoughts. But the important thing about those scenes is that they are directly rooted in the character’s specific circumstances – an opening monologue in which Adams imagines delineating every single one of her troubles to the colleague who replaced her at the gallery where she worked out is funny because of how detailed it is, and Adams’ depressed deadpan – and where Heller and the film loses me is when she starts doing greeting-card style maudlin declarations of What Motherhood Is.
There are trite observations thrown about after the weekly Family Singalong at the Library about how motherhood makes one a god, which is the kind of bullshit that feels faux-profound when you read it as an Instagram caption, especially once you realize that a sliver of the audience will be able to relate to the situation that its being said from. A single mother fighting for her child to have a decent future might be able to relate to the sentiment, but not the circumstances: That gilded cage must seem like a fucking dream to someone forced to wrangle childcare while hustling to make rent on the studio she and her baby survive in, not to mention the thousands of mothers who have it even worse than that. She’s surrounded by women in her tax bracket, who are either exact mirrors (whom she disdains at first and ultimately comes to “respect,” if painting large portraits of them is the measure of it) or were once like her (Jessica Harper is here as a librarian who has a mystical connection to Adams that’s never outright said or explained).
This is the myopia I’m talking about. For all of the specifics that will apply to mothers across income lines, much less race or any other important factor, there’s a scene implying a universality to Adams’ experience that is never outright questioned or considered, with only “society” to blame for her ills. I’m thinking of the controversy over that New Yorker cover from a few weeks back, in which the nannies in a local park discuss their growing children while watching those they’re tending to play. The sadness in that picture cuts in several ways: The nannies have sacrificed the time to tend to their children to raise others, while the wealthier parents of the children those nannies care for have sacrificed the same time to provide for their families. Both extremes are bad for the kids in the end: They’re losing out on time with their real families, regardless of whether or not they have an appropriate substitute to add some Flex Seal to their leaking, needy hearts. There is no choice for these parents, just desperation in the face of the cruel reality of modern economics in a city like New York: someone, somewhere, will pay for it. When Adams outlines a similar scenario, listing all of the things that make motherhood unbearable and difficult for a modern woman, it never becomes resonant: her circumstance is so estranged from the universal that it falls flat.
The thing is, Nightbitch would have had that greater resonance had it been set in Friedan’s era, in which choice didn’t matter as much as the expectations that one had, where one’s dreams ultimately became irrelevant once children entered the picture, even if there was enough money involved for someone to have a stable career outside of the home, and where no-fault divorce didn’t provide the ability for a woman to flee that sort of life without hefty penalties. There are still millions of “Shakespeare’s sisters” out there in the country, but there were more of them, once, with the entire country’s social engineering dedicated to preserving the rigidity of the Nuclear Family dynamic. This is where Heller’s empathy becomes less of an asset and more of a detriment. There’s no element of self-criticism for her protagonist, made even clearer when it climaxes with a series of congratulatory apologies from the bad actors she perceives in her life once she’s proved her worth and independence again.
Had Nightbitch just been willing to interrogate its protagonist a little more, to hold her complexity in a less clean and facile way, it might have been something truly special or at least more of a pair with the rest of Heller’s deeply considered and felt works. But such is the tragic flaw of preserving the anonymous naming conventions of debut autofiction when adapting it for the screen: Eventually, the universal fails to cover for the specific, and had Adams’ character been able to be more than “Mother” from the get-go, she might have threatened to become realistically sympathetic. That is its failure of imagination: All bark, no bite.