52 Films by Women Vol 8. 47. Nightbitch (Director: Marielle Heller)
Director Marielle
Heller cannot be accused of making the same movie twice. Nightbitch, which she adapted from the novel by Rachel
Yoder, features Amy Adams as an unnamed stay-at-home mother of a two-year-old
boy – let us call her Mom - who we watch mentally collapse. It is as different
from Can You Ever Forgive Me as it is from A Beautiful Day in the Neighbourhood. Nightbitch is highly-stylised, containing thoughts that
are never spoken – Mom telling other women what she really thinks about the
sacrifice she has made while her personality is systematically obliterated. It
also features Mom attracting dogs and then imagining that she is one herself.
The comedy is rooted in real experience. Appreciative guffaws of recognition filled
the screening I attended.
Nightbitch is a mental health film without an obvious
saviour figure. It features Jessica Harper (from Suspiria) as a
librarian who gives Mom a book about identifying with animals by Wendy
Wasserstein, better known as a playwright; I have no idea whether the book
exists, but the film has a lot of unreliable sequences, even a bathroom scene
in which Mom finds six pairs of dog teats on her chest. Her mind plays tricks.
The heart of her
problem is sleep-deprivation; that and being left alone with a handsome blond,
semi-articulate child (played by twins Arleigh Patrick Snowden and Emmett James
Snowden) who is demanding. ‘At some point, your child will pee into your face,’
Mom explains. The boy isn’t especially difficult, though he utters a rude word
during song time at a local library. The sing-along leader (Nate Heller, also
the film’s composer and the director’s brother) isn’t especially pleased.
In an early scene, Mom
takes her son shopping. When she observes another mother struggling with two
young children as they reach for food items on the shelf, she is relieved for
herself. However, when she meets a woman she recognises, she refers to her as
the woman who took her job, seething with resentment. When asked whether she is
enjoying motherhood – as if it were a salad – she expresses her exhaustion.
Only she doesn’t. Heller shows us what Mom wants to say, followed by her actual
reply.
Many films that set
up a problem in the first act tend to explore the possible solution in the
middle. By contrast, Nightbitch goes deeper into Mom’s psychosis, setting up
her larger shift in self-perception. She has given up her career - a job at a
gallery - and her own work as an artist to raise her son, or rather tend it to
him. For a long stretch in the film, she is on her own. Her husband (Scoot
McNairy) pops up around a fifth of the way through. He has a job that keeps him
away from home. His complaint about his working pattern rings hollow.
At no point does Mom
engage the services of a sitter, as if somehow that would be an admission of
defeat. She isn’t interested in joining other mothers either. She doesn’t want
to articulate resentment or lie about her feelings. Three women gravitate
towards her when one asks about her art. There is a neediness about their
attention, more about themselves than about Mom. When Mom tells them that she
used to be an artist, one of women confesses, ‘I used to be a stripper,’ as if asserting
equivalence. Heller compares the three women to three dogs that hang around
Mom, whom she first encounters in the park. The dogs appear to be attracted to
Mom’s anxiety.
At night, Mom reads
to her son a book about a truck. By day, they sit on the kerb watching refuse
workers go about their day. One of the men waves to them. Trucks are soothing,
soporific, also mechanical. We perceive that Mom is losing her sense of feeling.
The boy loses interest in the book. He wants Mom’s attention, or rather he
doesn’t know what he wants, except that he should share Mom’s experience.
Well, not every
time. We see Mom in a food court buying $41 worth of breakfast items – charged
by weight - giving her son some pieces of scrambled egg, encouraging him to
pick it up by hand. Mom’s biodegradable knife and fork sag, contact with moist
items making them unusable. Mom responds by lowering her face into the carton
of food, biting into items, eating like a dog. Her son looks afraid. Other
diners are aghast.
It is only when Mom
weans her son from her bed by buying him a doggy basket and encouraging him to
sleep in it that Pop gets really worried. Her response is to ask why he was so
quick to allow her to give up her career. ‘I thought I was being supportive,’
Pop pleads with some credibility.
Pictured: Before dog days kick in, Pop (Scoot McNairy) and Mom (Amy Adams) in a scene from the American comedy drama, 'Nightbitch', adapted from the novel by Rachel Yoder by writer-director Marielle Heller. Still courtesy of Searchlight Pictures (US, UK)
Two scenes cause us to experience parental anxiety. The first when Mom encourages her son, wearing only a disposable nappy, to use paint on a piece of paper that she has laid out on the kitchen floor. Her son puts his foot in yellow paint, then starts putting his paint-covered hands on the kitchen cabinet, finally knocking paint over. Watching him run into another room, Mom rushes to follow him, only to fall on her back. So much for fun time. As Heller lingers on Mom cleaning up after him, Amy Adams doesn’t appear to be acting. In the second scene, Pop prepares a bowl of spaghetti with tomato sauce for the child, only for the spaghetti to end up on the floor.
Why does Mom
identify as a dog? While allowing her son to ride her like a horse, her son notices
hair on her back. Mom examines herself. There is a bulbous lump. She heats up a
needle and bursts it. White pus-like liquid oozes out. Then Mom pulls at some
hair. She uncovers a tail. When she gives into Pop’s request for sex, she
allows herself to be penetrated from behind, doggy style.
Mom attempts to
re-insert herself into her world, dining with former colleagues. Only she
orders a kale salad, helps herself to a few mouthfuls, then sicks it up. Does
she reject it because she is unable to metabolize certain foods? Or is she expressing
disapproval of her colleagues’ superficiality? Or is she punishing herself for
wanting a child, then rejecting it?
You expect Mom to be
saved by a medical professional. That’s not the ending Heller gives us. Yes,
Mom takes the advice of another mother and gives herself a routine. Yes, she
returns to her art. The very end shows us something quite different.
Pictured: A cluster of mothers swarm around Mom (Amy Adams, right) in a scene from 'Nightbitch', adapted from Rachel Yoder's novel by writer-director Marielle Heller. Still courtesy of Searchlight Pictures (UK, US)
In contrast to her
previous two films, Nightbitch isn’t awards-bait. Adams performance is
self-abnegating, unflattering. She isn’t so much transformed as revealed, the
woman who does not want to be looked at or seek male approval. You can’t
describe the film as feel-good entertainment. However, it does what the best
movies should – take you to a place that you don’t necessarily want to go, to
show you what life is like. In the end, Mom is compelled to repeat the cycle.
That’s what we all do.
Reviewed at London Film Festival, Royal Festival Hall, Wednesday 16 October 2024, 18:00 Gala screening
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