The year I got divorced my job sent me to a career event for women in our line of work that purported to be a fundraiser for a domestic abuse charity. What it actually entailed was a group of wealthy women reassuring each other, with no sense of irony, that the secret to their professional success was a supportive family. (Hired help with the cleaning and the children went without saying, of course.) As I learned about how these women with endless resources in their personal lives still struggled, for mystifying and not at all systemic reasons, to achieve their career heights, my coffee curdled on the table as it was hammered into my skull that such ladylike solidarity would never extend to me thanks to my different class and my lack of a husband as wonderful as theirs. But people with such privilege are usually blind to it until and unless they experience a change of circumstances. Remember how Sheryl Sandberg mocked the criticisms of her Lean In ethos until her husband died? Nightbitch, the story of a wealthy woman’s awakening to the unfairness of gender roles, the limits of her body, and the enormous and boring amount of work it takes to raise a child even within quiet luxury, is very much a movie by and for that type of women. This is both its strength and its greatest weakness.
None of the main three characters have names. The mother (Amy Adams) lives in a large house in a well-kept California suburb close to grocery stores, playgrounds, and libraries. Her husband (Scoot McNairy, always a treat) travels a lot for work, leaving her alone with their adorable little boy (played by twins Arleigh and Emmett Snowden). The baby, a two-year-old toddler, is developmentally completely normal, but only sleeps in the mother’s bed, meaning she hasn’t had a solid night’s rest since his birth. Her fatigue and general malaise makes daily life with her son – errands, slow walks, meals cooked at home, little excursions and, worst of all, music hour at the library – a tedious and mind-numbing grind, even more awful because the mother is actually an artist! She once had a show at the modern museum in the city! She is better than the other mothers singing along with the silly library songs! Of course, her kid is the only one to yell an obscenity, which the mother feels makes her the worst mother in the world and which sets off a spiralling crisis implied, very literally, by the title.
So. When a woman is in a cage of her own making, what is she to do? Her husband is well-meaning and trying to be supportive despite his absences, but also blind to the amount of resentments that the mother has nurtured thanks to the exhausting and relentless nature of parenting work. The other women at the library, including the librarian (Jessica Harper making a very strong impression, and more on that later) are kind and want to be friends, but the mother still feels herself a cut above. The house is immaculate but the effort somebody, possibly some invisible hired help, must expend to maintain that cleanliness isn’t shown. Extended family isn’t mentioned, except that the mother’s late mother (Kerry O’Malley) gave up her own performing career for her daughter, discussed in monologues about how the mother wishes she was still alive in order to help her manage her stresses. None of those stresses are expressed to her child in any way, of course, and it is repeated she is glad she made the choice to be a mother. And yet: dead animals pile up on the porch. A rare dinner in the city with artist friends explodes into catastrophe because of the mother’s inability to contribute to the chatter. The husband plays on his phone instead of interacting with his child. And yet, and yet, and yet.
All of Marielle Heller’s movies have been literary adaptations about the importance of kindness, the irritating and unignorable requirements of the body, and how tough it is for smart women to survive in a world interested in their bodies before their intelligence. Unfortunately this is the first, which she adapted herself from the novel by Rachel Yoder, to feel derivative. Ms. Adams’ monologues to camera about her grievances could have come from the Barbie movie, and the mother’s occasional violent fantasies, and the style in which they are filmed by frequent collaborator Brandon Trost, are a straight lift from the much more repulsive and unnerving Eileen. The solution to the mother’s career problems is the same as that in Marriage Story (a pretty damning indictment of American relationships if you ask me). Even the scenes of body horror and transformation pale in comparison to this year’s gleefully nasty The Substance, which at least had the sense to be very clear about the precarity of the privilege its women enjoyed. Here the mother has no such awareness. The fancy clothes, the two cars, the manicured lawn and a total lack of financial worry all go without saying. It’s mainly the sound cues by Damian Volpe, meant to be alarm bells in the mother’s head, that give the main clue when something is awry, that and the inspired choice of “Joyful Girl” by Ani DiFranco to soundtrack the opening parenting montage.
But the most surprising thing is how supportive the husband is of the mother even as he is unaware of her true moods and feelings. Mr. McNairy projects a calm decency that’s often taken for granted, but here that stillness and good cheer is weaponised when the husband falls short. Even in their worst arguments it’s emphasised the husband (why is he not called the father?) wants to and is trying to do the right thing for the mother. At no point does he denigrate the mother’s career in any way or imply that her work is a distraction from her true responsibilities of hearth and home. The reason for this surprise is that I have worked with a lot of men who dismissed their wives’ careers as insignificant because they earned less money. I have also known a lot of husbands to become controlling the second their wives became financially dependent on them, even if that dependence was parenting-focused and a joint decision. On the other hand, a movie that tried to take the gild off the cage of fancy domesticity and address male selfishness in addition to the demands of parenting would be torn to shreds before it even received financing. And a movie about, say, a survivor of domestic abuse collapsing under the pressure of trying to care for her child in sub-optimal circumstances simply would not receive support, attention and distribution like this from Hollywood. Can you imagine the scene with the wine glasses passing without comment if it was working-class women revealing those secrets? Class solidarity triumphs over all.
Ms. Adams vaulted to the A-list with her Oscar-nominated performance in Junebug as a young working-class woman convinced a baby would solve all the problems in her life and marriage, so this part, in a movie she also produced, is an interesting rhyme, as well as possibly a backslide. And Ms. Heller’s insistence in all her movies of providing an excellent supporting part to an overlooked actress of a certain age allowed Ms. Harper to quietly drive the entire plot through her empathy and cutting wisdom. But this is not enough to transform Nightbitch from a good movie into a great one. Though women from my class would say that, of course.
Nightbitch is now in theaters.
Learn more about the film, including how to buy tickets, at the official website.
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