Tag: Amy Adams

Marielle Heller walked the Red Carpet outside the Music Box Theater on Monday, October 21st at the 60th Chicago International Film Festival in support of “Nightbitch,” which she co-wrote and directed. The screenplay is based on the book by Rachel Yoder. Heller’s previous directing forays include “Diary of a Teen-aged Girl” (2015), “Can You Ever Forgive Me” (2018) and “A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood” (2019). Amy Adams and Scoot McNairy play a husband and wife parenting a toddler, played by twin tow-heads Arleigh and Emmett Snowden.

“I’m never going to be smart, happy or thin ever again. And I’m pretty sure I’m turning into a dog,” says the Mother character. That line sums up the plot. All mothers in the audience will be able to relate—up to the dog part, anyway. The theme of a hassled Mom trying to cope with daily life at home with kids reminded me of Jason Reitman’s 2018 film “Tully,” but Charlize Theron had three kids and there was no werewolf-ian metamorphosis involved.

Marielle Heller on October 21, 2024, at the 60th Chicago International Film Festival.

As she took the stage to accept her Visionary award, Marielle Heller said, “This is one of my most personal films. I’m just thrilled to be bringing it here tonight.” The 98-minute film’s tag line? “ Motherhood is a bitch.” The IMDB classification lists Body Horror, Comedy, Horror, and Dark Comedy. If you liked “Can You Ever Forgive Me” which earned Melissa McCarthy an Oscar nomination, you’ll like this one. If you’re a Mom, you’ll like it twice as much. (Amy Adams won a TIFF acting award for her role.)

Q&A

After the film screened, Heller shared some insights into the production. The feeling that this could be “any city” and “any Mom” was intentional. Specifics are missing on purpose, including names. Heller is delineating the marital playbook where the wife gives up her career and her dreams to stand by her man. She is thinking, “How many women have delayed their greatness while the men around them didn’t know what to do with theirs?” Adams’ character was a successful artist and worked in an art gallery before she and her husband decided to have a child. Now, as the script says, “The whole concept of motherhood that we’re sold is basically bull-shit.”

SCRIPT
One scripted exchange between the couple has her husband saying, “What happened to the girl I married?” to which Amy Adams responds, “She died in childbirth.” The absence of specific names for our married couple is intentional. One scene (that others wanted to cut) was “the kale salad scene.” Heller described it as a difficult one for Amy Adams to play and “the heart of the film.” As she explained, “It’s that feeling of becoming more and more invisible as you age.” (Tell me about it. No, don’t. I live it daily.)

In the scene, the waiter seems to disregard Amy’s order of a kale salad on more than one occasion. The actor playing the waiter asked the director why the waiter doesn’t seem to respond to Amy Adams repeated request for a kale salad, as she dines out with former work colleagues. Heller told him, “Your ears are not tuned to the sound of any woman over 40.” Adams declares herself a “sand cow” and says, “The woman that I used to be, she’s down here in my intestines, buried in kale.”

SETS/CASTING

Marielle Heller on the Red Carpet outside the Music Box Theater in Chicago during the 60th Chicago International Film Festival on October 21, 2024.

One interesting fact was that the team looking for a house to use for filming looked at over 60 of them. Heller said, “There was more effort to make the movie seem effortless than you could imagine.” (She stumbled upon the house at 2 a.m. on Zillow). She explained that the house they were seeking should demonstrate a certain level of good taste, but “with a layer of baby crap over the good taste.” The most difficult casting was that of the BookBaby Moms. Best BookBaby Moms scene is where each confides an anecdote about their failures as keepers of the household’s pets, whether a bird, a fish or a cat. The sharing occurred after Adams said, in response to inquiries from her BookBaby friends about the couple’s recent separation, “I just had to break out of it. And I killed the cat this week, which made me aware that I’m not doing well emotionally.”

HUMOR

It is dead-pan delivery of lines like the one about the cat that will amuse anyone with a sense of humor— especially any woman who is a new mother struggling to keep her head above water. The script (a collaboration between the author of the book and Heller) is particularly good. It conveys laughs that are truisms that hit home, as when Adams says, “I needed to dig around in the dark and just find myself again.” She salutes all women who have given birth, citing “That shared bond of all you’ve given up for the continuation of the species.”

One of the best and most humorous techniques that Heller uses throughout the film is to show the socially correct response, contrasted with the actual REAL response. One such exchange occurs in the produce aisle of the grocery store in response to a work colleague who asks Amy about being home all day with her new child. (REAL response, unsaid:“I would like to feel content, but instead I feel like I’m trapped within a prison of my own making.”) Instead, she trots out the socially and politically correct response. Scott McNairy as the husband finally admits, “I didn’t see all that you were giving up by being at home.” (An apology is tendered, which Heller said made some people feel uncomfortable. As for herself: “We need to see more men apologize in movies.”) Responding to the platitude “choose happiness” with a strong slap would be the real response. “I’ll try” is what women are conditioned to respond.

DIFFICULT SCENES

There are multiple dogs in the film. When asked about the difficulties of working with animals, Heller said, “With every dog there is a trainer who is talking off-camera. I didn’t know how chaotic that would feel.” She also embraced more unscripted spontaneity than in past films,
because of the small child (actually two twin boys) whose immediate responses needed to be captured. The twins were wonderful in their part and any mother of a small boy will be able to relate to the antics of the toddler.

Asked about one of her favorite scenes, Heller singled out the scene that was her favorite scene to watch with an audience. It involved Amy’s increasing feeling that she is somehow changing and becoming more animalistic. Heller’s brother, Nate, (who played the singing male leader of the Book Babies club) accused his sister of liking gross things. In the scene Amy Adams examines some changes her body is undergoing and takes action. As someone who has a friend who absolutely loves the “Dr. Pimple-popper” television segments, I’ll leave the specifics up to you to discover when you see the film in December (it premieres December 6th), but suffice it to say that it hasn’t been done on film in any movie I’ve seen.

Marielle Heller, Director of “Nightbitch,” onstage at the Music Box Theater during the Q&A at the 60th Chicago International Film Festival on October 21, 2024.

CONCLUSION
You’ll want to put this one on your “Things that make you laugh and cry at the same time,” —especially if you’re a Mom (as I am). If you’ve ever found yourself saying, “I don’t want anything or anyone else needing me or touching me,” then this is the film for you. Remember this scripted line if you’re still just giving the politically correct response to those questions about life with a new baby, “Insist on your joy. Time is short.”
Words to live by and a good reason to see “Nightbitch.”

“Arrival” Arrives at 52nd Annual Chicago Film Festival on October 27, 2016

By Connie Wilson

On October 28, 2016

In Movies, Pop Culture, Reviews

Director Denis Villeneuve (“Sicario”) was in Budapest filming a remake of “Blade Runner” with Ryan Gosling, so no Red Carpet action for the closing film of the 52nd International Chicago Film Festival.

Amy Adams plays a linguist named Louise Banks who is drafted by the military to figure out how to communicate with aliens who land in 12 locations around the globe. Forest Whittaker has a small part as the reasonable representative of the military who fetches Adams for duty The reason for the appearance of these extra-terrestrial beings is a mystery to all, but figuring out how to speak to them would certainly help solve the question, “What do they want? Why are they here?”

Jeremy Renner co-stars as a theoretical physicist also assigned to the case. You just know that, at some point, there will be a romance between the two, but let’s not go there just yet. Let’s take a stroll down Memory Lane and examine other movies about extra-terrestrial visits. The most noteworthy, of course, would be “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” (1977) which holds its own against this film. “Close Encounters” is, after all, the Gold Standard. I also thought of Jodie Foster’s “Contact” and even such oddities as “The Man Who Fell to Earth” (David Bowie) and the primitive “The Day the Earth Stood Still” first released in the fifties and remade in 2008. All of these films have laid the groundwork for “Arrival”, so nothing wrong with examining “Arrival’s predecessors, even if it’s just a kids’ movie about an alien who wants to phone home. (“E.T.”).

The sounds the aliens make are very reminiscent of “Close Encounters” and the noises that whales make, coupled with moans, breathing noises (from Adams and Renner in their haz-mat suits), whooshing sounds and loud brass instruments. All of that sort of thing we’ve seen (or heard) before.

The alien ship itself resembles the Hindenburg, a black oval standing on end. It’s been described in other terms, but suffice it to say that, yes, it is creepy and effective as an alien spacecraft and the aliens are equally strange-looking.

What do they look like, you ask? They are heptapods, which means that they have 7 legs like a squid or an octopus. I jotted down the word “mollusks” and “starfish” at various points. There is so much dry ice fog in every shot that I almost got the feeling that the aliens were part of a rock band. (I haven’’t seen that much dry ice white fog since it totally blocked out Isaac Hayes playing the “Shaft” theme from that 2000 movie at the Academy Awards).

Early on, we learn that Amy Adams had a daughter she lost to an incurable disease. Fortunately, the film doesn’t dwell on this plot point, but there are frequent flashbacks to Amy’s relationship with her daughter. I remember finding it odd that the father’s face was not shown, but I think I understand why now—if it’s the “right” interpretation. I thought of Sandra Bullock in “Gravity,” who has also just lost a child before going into space as an astronaut, so apparently it’s a pre-requisite for women undertaking dangerous missions in space that they be emotionally fragile following the death of a child.

I will say that this film seems like it should give way to a separate film that focuses exclusively on Amy Adams’ character, as she seems to have the ability to “see” the future. It was surprising, to me, that so little interest was shown in her unique abilities as the film winds down. Odd, that. She asks a poignant question of Jeremy Renner near film’s end, “If you could see your whole life from start to finish, would you change things?” Prior to that, she says, “Despite knowing the journey and where it leads, I embrace it and I welcome every moment of it.”

Some other plot points that might help you figure out one probable interpretation of the plot, (hopefully without actually giving it away), are these lines: “Memory is a strange thing. It doesn’t work like I thought it did. We are so bound by time, by its order. I remember moments in the middle…There are days that define your story beyond your understanding.”

I’ve described both the alien spaceship and the aliens themselves and anyone who has seen a sci fi movie since the fifties will know that there is always some government stooge who immediately wants to blast the aliens. In this movie that role is played by Michael Stuhlbarg as Agent Halpen. The experts can’t figure out why the 12 ships have landed in the selected locations (in the U.S., it’s Montana) At one point, they throw out the theory that all of the countries where the 12 alien ships have made an appearance were countries where Sheena Easton had a hit in the eighties. (Pretty sure that was a joke, Son.)

One other important plot point that viewers planning on attending this movie should know is that the aliens have a very fluid concept of time. This seems to be a characteristic they share with the writers. At one point the idea is thrown out that, if you learn a foreign language, you might think in a different way due to being immersed in the language…a sort of “brain training.” The line “You can see time the way they do” is thrown out at one point, and it certainly does seem that Louise has some major-league “gifts” that we normal folk don’t have, when it comes to seeing what the future may hold.

The movie is based on the short story “The Story of Your Life” by Ted Chiang, with a screenplay by Eric Heisserer. I have a feeling that some of the movie-going public are going to go away very confused by the film and the way in which the plot jumps around in time.

The rest of you—real movie buffs—are going to enjoy discussing this film at length in the same way that serious movie buffs enjoyed discussing the meaning(s) hidden in “2001: A Space Odyssey” and “Twelve Monkeys.”