>>358726The Buyer's-Remorse Feminism of NightbitchAmy Adams can't resuscitate women's lib.By Armond White
The double-barreled title of Nightbitch satirizes both feminism and female self-loathing. The protagonist - an unnamed woman - berates her husband for ignoring their crying infant and then fantasizes her own metamorphosis into a powerful, aggressive canine. This petulant idea almost works because actress Amy Adams, in the nameless role, benefits from no longer being overexposed. Her girl-next-door charm, recalled from The Fighter, American Hustle, and Man of Steel, pulls off the film's best routine:
<I'd love to feel content but instead I feel like I'm stuck. I'm just angry all the time. . . . I'd like to direct some of my anger toward the system that dictates all this, but I'm dumb now.It's a better Barbie speech, critiquing the hoodwink of manic feminist ideology that is its source. Director Marielle Heller (A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood and Can You Ever Forgive Me?) focuses on characters who have cause to be ambivalent about themselves, which means Heller is also a social satirist. But Nightbitch comes too close to self-pity, starting with the defiant image of a bloated, full-bodied Adams (possibly AI-generated; not de-aging but be-fatting). She resembles the non-charismatic Amy Schumer, although Melissa McCarthy could have played this, too.
Heller's screenplay adaptation of the 2021 novel by Rachel Yoder indulges the selfish antagonism that Millennial feminists take as their prerogative. This prevents Adams from showing the disarming quality that Helena Bonham Carter brought to the eccentric mother figure in the 2010 Toast, an unconventional comic biography of chef Nigel Slater's maternal fixation. Nightbitch panders to feminist anger, neglecting the fulfillment felt by its target audience of new moms.
It seems that #MeToo feminism has lost the equanimity that wins arguments. Maybe that's why the husband figure (Scoot McNairy) is portrayed as a dirtbag. And when the Adams character recovers her premarital creativity as an artist, Heller inadvertently trivializes her gallery show with a brief, piddling montage of making dead-animal taxidermy and painting Alex Katz-style portraits of her pregnant friends.
The sorrows of motherhood become a blame game - perimenopause nightmares of extra nipples and lycanthropic hunting (as a husky, of course). Plus, apologetic memories of her dead European mother. Heller seems blissfully ignorant of what motherhood means - as if pregnancy resulted only from violation, not mutual engagement.
Nightbitch lacks the richness of Irvin Kershner's 1972 Up the Sandbox, made at the peak of Second Wave feminism, in which pregnant housewife Barbra Streisand contemplated abortion and unleashed a memorably caustic, rapid-fire monologue:
<You've got one job, I've got 97. I can't be a perfect image of a female. I'm not even as good a housekeeper as my own mother! I'm a zero, a nothing. I thought love was enough. I cook. I sew. I squeegee. I spend hours waiting in line for a sale on baby sandwiches to save a few pennies. I've got one kid who likes Sicilian pizza, a husband who likes Neapolitan pizza. One who likes western omelets, the other one won't touch eggs. One who hates raisins and one who's afraid of the wind. I'm an errand boy, a cook, a dishwasher, a cockroach-catcher and you say I'd be happy if I did more!Somehow, decades after that definitive rant (written by playwright Paul Zindel, adapting the book by Anne Richardson Roiphe), Heller's heroine never mentions "love." Adams receives a book, Field Guide to Magical Women (from Jessica Harper in a light-hearted turn as a librarian liberated from feminist expectation), but then delivers an ugly speech about childbirth as "the most violent act other than death itself."
Adams's complaint - "I have found myself in a 1950s marriage" - actually seems like Hollywood resentment of the middle class and guilt about their own noncelebrity moms. When Nightbitch is bad, it's a continuation of the irredeemable Don't Worry, Darling. Heller has bought into so much #MeToo psychobabble that Nightbitch is a buyer's-remorse movie. A few moments are sharp and funny, but when resentful mom Adams complains that "being an artist is the silliest, most self-absorbed thing you can be," Heller ignores the warning yet still doesn't prove her wrong.