All About My Mother: Amy Adams Goes to the Dogs In Marielle Heller’s Barking Mad Dramedy
“Motherhood is fucking brutal,” Amy Adams’ unnamed Mother seethes in Nightbitch. Marielle Heller’s adaptation of Rachel Yodel’s novel is a fiery challenge of society’s traditional, patriarchal notions of motherhood….until it isn’t. Not nearly as daring or outrageous as it aspires to be, the well balanced mix of drama, comedy, and fantasy doesn’t so much to upset the status quo as find a way to make sense of it. But if that very structure for raising a family makes you literally want to go to the dogs, if raising kids makes you feel erased as a person, why not create your own framework for happiness?
Once an acclaimed artist with a thriving career, to paraphrase the Talking Heads, Mother now finds herself in a beautiful house, with a beautiful Husband (Scoot McNairy), raising their Son (played by twins Arleigh Patrick and Emmett James Snowden) and asking herself, “Well, how did I get here?” Each and every day, week, and month is a carbon copy of the last. Mother genuinely loves her Son, but almost nothing else that comes along with parenting. She doesn’t enjoy the company of other mothers, can barely tolerate baby hours at the library, and finds a resentment growing inside her she doesn’t know what to do with. Her well-meaning, but ineffectual Husband isn’t much help either. Often traveling for work, he’s blind to Mother’s bitterness, and even when it does surface, when he offers to take over caring for their Son, he requires her assistance anyway. Mother has never had a break or time for herself since her child was born. She’s about to snap, but even worse, she thinks she’s turning into a dog….
Mother’s transition from human to canine — complete with a tuft of hair on her lower back and a tail — is a (mostly) metaphorical outlet for her teeth-gnashing anger. Going on all fours allows her to start exploring what she needs to do to construct a satisfying life and the ways in which raising her Son mirrors her own upbringing. The screenplay’s weakest element sees Mother reflecting on her childhood in the Mennonite community and the fact that her own mother gave up a chance at a starry singing career to raise a family. Nightbitch doesn’t do enough to reckon with this decision, and it feels like an unnecessary aside that adds little to Mother’s current dilemma (other than a rather contrived artistic connection).
In some ways, Nightbitch feels like the other side of the coin to Coralie Fargeat’s The Substance. Where the latter Cannes Best Screenplay winner took aim at mainstream beauty standards, Heller’s picture zeroes in on the pastel-colored, apron-wearing expectations of motherhood. Both pictures choose a barn-sized target, but where Fargeat’s body-horror keeps doubling down in the extremes of its broadsides, Heller’s film feels defanged. While it’s filled with bon mots — “I could crush a walnut with my vagina!” Mother rages — and occasional devastating truths (“What happened to my wife?” Husband asks, to which she replies, “She died in childbirth”) it stops short in offering a view of what completely dismantling capitalist, middle and upper class notions of motherhood could look like.
Despite a go-for-broke performance by Amy Adams and a provocative title that will send a titter among Wine Club Moms, Nightbitch disappointingly comes around to reinforcing an astonishingly white, privileged, heteronormative mode of relationships. The film’s final act steers away from the idea of a woman setting the terms of how she’ll live and raise children on her own and finds Mother (almost) back where she started. It’s not intended, but perhaps that’s the greatest horror of them all.
Reviewed on September 9th at the 2024 Toronto International Film Festival – Special Presentations Programme. 98 Minutes.
★★★/☆☆☆☆☆
