What Will It Take To Get Amy Adams Out of Her Flop Era?

Everyone gets their flop era. Sometimes, life doesn’t go your way, and when it happens on a huge public platform, your professional struggles seem to take on the weight of cultural importance. For every And Justice For All, there’s a Saint Anger. Oscar winners get Razzie noms. World Cup victors stumble in the heats. Still, nobody likes it when their favourites seem forever stuck in a rut of creative failures, especially when they become somewhat incomprehensible or even irritating. We Amy Adams fans know the pain all too well, and it doesn’t feel like we’re out of the woods just yet.

Adams, a six-time Oscar nominee and industry-beloved actress, doesn’t need my defences. She’s a versatile performer who has done drama, comedy, musical, action, and sci-fi. She’s worked with Spielberg, Villeneuve, PTA, and Mike Nichols. She did both The Master AND The Muppets. It’s always felt like a matter of ‘when, not if’ in regards to her becoming an Oscar winner. But these past few years of Adams films have been, well, a bit rough.

My theory is that it started when Adams didn’t get an Oscar nomination for Best Actress for Arrival. Denis Villeneuve’s achingly humane sci-fi drama isn’t just one of her best films; it’s her greatest performance by a country mile. As Louise, a linguist tasked with finding a means of communication with an alien species, she is at her most tender and tenacious. As an actress, Adams’ greatest skill is her deceptive strength. She seems so sweet and approachable, very Girl Next Door, and that allows her the ability to sneak in moments of grit and devastation at unexpected times. Consider The Master, where she plays the wife of a cult leader, who mimics the expected part of the supportive spouse but slowly reveals her truth as the real power player behind the operation. With Arrival, she is wholly believable as the one human out of seven billion who is empathetic, intelligent, and sceptical enough to do what nobody else can. So, of course she didn’t get an Oscar nomination! Of course it was too good for the Academy in a year where they had to make room for yet another iffy late-era Meryl Streep performance.

After that, the films just got kind of bad. You can understand why Adams chose them: chances to work with acclaimed directors on buzzy material that felt like a shoo-in for a return to the podium. The results, however, were mostly DOA. Yes, she got nominated for Vice, for the thankless role of Lynne Cheney in a very bad and smug biopic, but it felt more like a courtesy nod than a celebratory one. Dear Evan Hansen was a mess. The Woman in the Window, endlessly delayed and shunted onto streaming, could have been camp fun but took itself far too seriously. Hillbilly Elegy was an unmitigated disaster for both culture and democracy, and also contained what is easily Adams’ worst performance.

These films were all, at one point in their pre-release hype, touted as Oscar nominees in waiting. Their failure to land a single nomination just made the notion of Adams being in her flop era that much stronger. It added a sheen of desperation to the mix, which obviously wasn’t fair but it was present nonetheless. Failed Oscar bait does that to its participants.

It didn’t help that none of these films gave Adams much to do. They were far more trope-laden than the works where she truly shines and she could only do so much with rotten material. The more it felt like Adams was trying to conform to the stifling mould of Academy-approved concepts, the more uninteresting the work became. Here was an actress crying out for something with real verve, a challenge that could let her break free from the demure and peppy types she was being lazily placed into.

This is partly what makes Nightbitch, her latest release and a film I enjoyed, a frustrating experience. In an adaptation of Rachel Yoder’s novel, Adams plays the nameless Mother, a stay-at-home parent who is finding the repetition of days alone with her toddler increasingly stifling. As her rage at the system grows, she begins to exhibit strange symptoms. She’s hairier than usual. Her teeth feel sharper. There’s a weird bump growing out of her lower back. Is she actually transforming into a dog, and if so, would that really be such a bad thing?

Director Marielle Heller, a formidable talent, whose first three films are all excellent, has talked about feeling the pressure to tone down some of the novel’s grosser and more abrasive details. Certainly, on the page, Mother’s potential transformation is far more visceral, and one dark incident involving the family cat practically dares you to continue sympathizing with her. The sheer primal force of feminine rage and parental duty is palpable in Yoder’s novel, and in the film, it’s a more distinctly timid affair. The changes are understandable, especially for a major American studio release with the word ‘bitch’ in the title. It feels like Heller and Adams had to fight for what they got. Yet in a post-The Substance world, how can it compete? A body horror where someone pulls a whole chicken drumstick from their navel is an Oscar favourite! Nobody could have predicted how that film would become a commercial and critical darling, but its impact was immediate on its competition.

It’s a shame because, frankly, Adams could benefit from a chance to revel in freak mode for a while. She’s an actress so prized for her poise and fragility, but that steely quality she brings to films like The Master is crying out for more screen time. When she rolls around in the dirt in Nightbitch and growls at the moon, it’s invigorating. But it’s so sparsely shown in a movie crying out for more of that feral fury. Imagine Amy Adams in an Ari Aster bleakly comedic anxiety trip or a Robert Eggers heated period horror. It makes too much sense.

Critics have been generally positive toward Nightbitch, and I count myself among those numbers. Adams recently landed a Golden Globe nomination for the film, but there’s also this sense that she’s simply not in the running for the Best Actress Oscar anymore, and that sucks. The competition isn’t just bigger, it’s weirder and grander. It’s as much bad timing as it is a creative stumble.

But hope is not lost. Adams is too good an actress to be sent adrift. Every upcoming project feels like a potential fist through the flop-era ceiling. She’s working with Taika Waititi on an adaptation of Kazuo Ishiguro’s Klara and the Sun, which has fascinating possibilities, and she’s also headlining a new drama by Kornel Mundruczo. But it would be weird and lazy to condense Adams’ wonderful career down to whether or not she’ll ever win an Oscar. Frankly, some of the most intriguing actors of our time have never even come close to the statuette. I would love to see Adams enter her F*ck It era and make some off-the-wall choices. Maybe give Cole Escola or Jane Schoenburn a call and offer her services. Do a body horror. Steal some scripts from Nicole Kidman before she notices they’re gone. I’ll still follow her wherever she goes. Just not to Hillbilly Elegy.