It came as a big, bitter surprise to discover that Mariel Heller’s new film Nightbitch is, for the most part, excruciating to watch. Heller made two of the best films of recent years: Can You Ever Forgive Me? There are “A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood” and “A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood,” but this new work has few of those strengths. Those films are energized by sincere and passionate curiosity. Heller apparently can’t get enough of his protagonists. She observes and listens to them with the tenacity of an investigative journalist, creating a visual style that matches their broader discourse. In “Night Bitch,” Heller gives the impression that she knows exactly what she wants to say, and as a result she turns her characters into spokespeople, filming with little sense of discovery. Masu. While a new film from such an exploratory director is a disappointment, there are still some very interesting diagnostic points about the film’s shortcomings.
Based on the novel by Rachel Yoder, Night Bitch follows a family of three living in a comfortable suburban neighborhood. The names of the family members have not been disclosed. Amy Adams stars as an artist and former gallery employee who lives at home with her toddler son, whom she now calls Baby. Her husband (Scoot McNairy) has a job that requires long hours and frequent travel. He says he was writing a report late at night in his hotel room, but that’s about all he was exposed. (In the novel, he is an engineer, they live in a “small town in the Midwest,” and she runs a community-based gallery, but the characters are similarly unnamed.) The baby sleeps His mother has to take care of him day and night while running the house. She doesn’t seem to have any friends. She reluctantly takes her baby to the local library for a reading and singing session with the “Book Babies” family, but she only looks down on the other suburban moms. , they think they are unintelligent, unfashionable, uninspired, uninteresting, and uninteresting.
The mother is isolated, exhausted, frustrated and miserable. In social situations, she feels pressured to lyrically express the joys of motherhood, even as she fantasizes about speaking her mind and being physically violent. Masu. But the mother is not angry. Instead, she transforms into a dog at night. She notices that she has grown sharp incisors, unexpected fur, a tail, and six extra nipples, as well as an increased sense of smell, a craving for meat, an urge to hunt small animals, and an irresistible presence for the neighborhood’s stray dogs. I started to feel an overwhelming fascination with it. (As in the novel, she also calls herself Night Bitch.) At first, Night Bitch thinks she is dreaming, but when she wakes up she has killed a rabbit, then the family cat. I realize that.
The first hint of “Night Bitch’s” aesthetic problems is when Adams’ character calls a toddler “baby.” We soon learn that the namelessness of major characters is not simply a matter of omission, but rather a deliberate choice not to reveal their characteristics, as many secondary and incidental characters are not named. It was revealed that it is part of. For example, there is no indication of the couple’s interest. They don’t talk about anything other than basic practical things. He plays a video game (which game?). A couple is sitting and watching something on TV (what?). When she’s home with Baby, there’s no radio, no podcasts, no music, and nothing to identify her. She plays the role of a mother and sometimes a wife.
Of course, that’s the point. Stripped of everything that makes her who she is by endless housework, Night Bitch’s suppressed anger explodes and she undergoes a violent transformation. But that’s an elevator pitch, not an experience. The film’s premise is expressed in the abstract, planned with quasi-mathematical rigor that simply ignores the details on which the drama depends. It’s as if the story was plotted on a graph with one axis for “money” and one for “communication.”
Early on, Night Bitch tries to convey to her husband her dissatisfaction and desire to change the situation by taking a part-time job. He shut her down by declaring, “You know, the math doesn’t quite add up,” meaning her income is less than child support. But what is that number? What are the other relevant numbers? How much does he earn? How much does their comfortable, large house cost? How much do they rent and how much do they have in savings? Perhaps if he was earning enough to pay for daycare and a babysitter? Night Bitch is going to be a very short movie. Lack of money is an underlying stress that remains unexpressed and unexplored in this film. So you can see that there are no other purchases or payments in this movie that would cause any doubts or second thoughts. Spoiler alert, when a change in a couple’s circumstances involves a sudden increase in expenses, they don’t discuss it or discuss it passionately. No problem at all.
The film’s silence about money is consistent with a broader silence concerning another axis along which the story is graphed: communication. Nightbitch has repeatedly made it clear that the decision to quit her gallery job and artistic calling to stay home with Baby was her own and that she was eager to do it. What is unknown is the couple’s decision to leave the city and move to the suburbs, how they anticipated the financial implications, what their other options were, and what experiences and aspirations led Nightbitch to make this choice. I wonder if he encouraged it. She also accused her husband of making her choice too quickly, when he would have recognized the importance of her career and art if he had objected. What are their politics? Why did they think they could find happiness in the suburbs?
Night Bitch grew up outside the city, and her mother, an accomplished singer who gave up her own career to raise her children, is understood to have gone through something similar to the nocturnal changes Night Bitch is currently experiencing. There is. Has she discussed this with her husband? Why doesn’t she have any friends to talk to or anyone she can trust? She has friends in the art world from graduate school, but when she reunites with them after a long time, she finds out that they are total assholes who she can’t confide in. Nightbitch and her husband not only don’t talk much now; They didn’t seem to talk much until Baby came along. They give the impression that they first met on set when Heller first called “Action.” There is no loam of shared experience, no sense of a shared life, nothing between them but the silence on which the story depends, and without silence again the drama is quickly resolved. I have very little experience with dogs. A director who imagined these characters in more subjective detail would have included more of Night Bitch’s wild adventures. In this respect, like many other works, Heller’s adaptation disrupted Yoder’s novel. (For example, if this movie had dramatized the ending of the book, it would probably have rivaled “The Substance” as a gonzo spectacle.)
“Night Bitch”’s silence about money and its blankness about its inner and communal life make the film an empty and contrived experience. This is surprising, not only because Heller’s previous two works were so careful and passionate, but also because the subject matter of the new one turns out to be one in which she feels a personal stake. Because of that. I only learned this when I read colleague Emily Nussbaum’s recent profile of Heller. In it, Heller talks about her experience staying home with her young children while her partner, director Jorma Taccone, continued to work. The heart of the film’s artistic failure lies in the paradox of heavy personal investment and frozen artistic engagement. The inherent conflict between Night Bitch’s misery and her husband’s realistic indifference is a poignant and fruitful subject for film, and a classic premise for melancholic melodrama. But the sweetness of the story and the fading of its details suggests an anxiety and ambiguity about its personal aspects.
The directors of the great couple melodramas either had no such concerns, or were more comfortable with the autobiographical aspects of their art. There is nothing to suggest that Douglas Sirk was reporting on family life in There’s Always Tomorrow. Everyone understood that Ingmar Bergman, with his partner Liv Ullmann, was doing something similar with A Marriage. As for Ida Lupino, she directed the extraordinary 1953 marital melodrama The Bigamists, in which she and Joan Fontaine co-starred as one man’s two wives. Shortly after, Lupino divorced the film’s screenwriter and co-producer Collier Young. producer, and Fontaine married him. The couple’s melodrama seems to flourish through philosophical detachment or, conversely, through unbridled candor and sheer bluster, but in any case, it’s not the kind of defensiveness seen in Night Bitch. ♦
