Motherhood is a bitch.
That was the tagline for Nightbitch on its teaser poster, which features a photo of a sweaty, dirty, snarling Amy Adams. Her face is in closeup, sharply front-lit against a dark background, her head turned to look over her shoulder, almost as if she’s been caught in headlights at night. This a movie about a woman who’s having a tough time — or, really, just an ordinary time — parenting a toddler, and it’s making her so crazy that she has fallen under the delusion (or is it?) that she is turning into a dog. So, then, here she is, clearly startled during her canine-esque nocturnal wanderings, her visage briefly captured, perhaps, by an accidental cryptozoologist.
It’s an extraordinary poster, not quite like any I’ve ever seen before: ferocious, hinting at a savageness that is newly unleashed in a woman who otherwise looks… so… nice. In an entertainment ecosystem that all too often reduces women to mothers, and then motherhood to either one-dimensional saintliness or one-dimensional villainy, this poster seems to say: Here is a movie specifically about motherhood that is going to bite your fucking head off.
I would like to see that movie. Because, alas, Nightbitch is not it.
Misleading marketing aside, I don’t think it’s too much to have expected a bite-your-head-off movie, because the novel, by Rachel Yoder, upon which this is based is indeed fierce, feral, and full of rage. I read it before I saw the film, and I thought, This is gonna be tough to adapt for the screen, because it’s so internal. It’s almost stream-of-consciousness, as the unnamed protagonist contemplates the career as an artist and curator she gave up in return for the relentless, all-consuming monotony of motherhood, and then the wild freedom she rediscovers in her, well, bitch alter ego.
But it’s not the internality that writer and director Marielle Heller (A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood, The Diary of a Teenage Girl) struggles with. That actually works pretty well onscreen. One instance is such a great scene that it’s in the (somewhat less misleading) trailer: Adams’s (Justice League, Arrival) Mother complains to Husband (Scoot McNairy: A Quiet Place: Part II, Destroyer) about her stuck-at-home misery as he goes off to work, at a job that keeps him out of town all week, every week, rendering her a de facto single parent most of the time to terrible-two Son (Arleigh Patrick Snowden and Emmett James Snowden). He responds that “happiness is a choice”… earning him a well-deserved how-very-dare smack across his face. And then we get the second take, the reality, in which Mother refrains from slapping her clueless partner and instead swallows his condescension and makes nice.
It works well to portray Mother’s state of mind, but it also comes, as depicted here, with a lighter tone that undercuts the feminist rancor of Yoder’s book, and even undercuts Mother herself. Nightbitch the movie does the same thing Mother does: bites its tongue for fear of offending.
For sure, there are many realities of women’s lives that remain unexplored in pop culture, and this movie does confront some of those connected with motherhood with glee: the tedium of kiddie food — hash browns and mac ’n’ cheese — that it ends up just easier for Mommy to also feed herself; the daily self-medicating that progresses from caffeine to wine; the lack of meaningful contact with other adults; and more. These are the small indignities that women, that mothers, endure, the truths that only oh-so rarely get public airings, the things that are so mundane that we’re not supposed to tell stories, make movies about them. And they are here, on display, with the glorious Amy Adams the face of them. All that is absolutely worth celebrating. None of it is even subtle, and that’s exactly what is needed. In your face, Husbands.
(Note that Mother’s partner is called Husband, not Father, because he’s barely the latter, and not much of the former, either, except in name. These labels are only in the film’s credits — the characters are not called by “name” onscreen — but don’t think this is an accidental reflection of how we have organized our society, as I might if this were a less feminist movie. Here, for all the film’s faults, I am sure it is a deliberate commentary on how differently we, the big We, see men and women, and how we value what each gender brings to family dynamics.)
But while the novel goes to shockingly animalistic places, really finds something vicious awakened in its unfulfilled protagonist, Nightbitch the movie goes for gentle comedy with only a tinge of body horror. It’s never “Motherhood is a bitch *howl* *screech* *rip out the throat of an innocent bunny rabbit*” — instead it defaults to the much safer “Motherhood is a bitch, haha, pardon my French, but am I right, ladies? #LOL. Live, bark, love.” It is as afraid of leaning into maternal malcontentment as Mother is, in that aforementioned scene, of speaking her mind.
This is, unfortunately, the sort of movie for which Amy Adams will be hailed for being “brave” for daring to appear onscreen as a realistic-looking harried mother to a demanding toddler, seemingly sans makeup and less than Hollywood-svelte — which isn’t false but is also nothing but a condemnation of Hollywood’s treatment of women. I wish we could be praising her for a brutish portrayal of the reclaiming of a feral female nature that is depicted in the novel… but we can’t because she wasn’t allowed to bring that. (She is a goddess, and would have been very capable of it.)
Maybe Heller didn’t actually struggle with bringing Mother’s anger to the screen. Maybe she held back, because she knew that the world is not ready to face the unshackled rage of women.
more films like this:
• Tully [Prime US | Prime UK | Apple TV US | Apple TV UK | Netflix US]
• Mama [Prime US | Prime UK | Apple TV]
