Tag Archives: Marielle Heller

New In Theaters

Bark at the Moon

Leave a comment

Nightbitch

by Hope Madden

There’s something wrong with Mother.

That’s the only name we have for Amy Adams’s character in Marielle Heller’s darkly surreal comedy Nightbitch, because it’s all we really need to know about her. Whatever she was before Baby (Arleigh and Emmet Snowden, adorable)—a successful artist, as it turns out—hardly matters now. Some time before the opening credits rolled, she gave that up to be a stay-at-home mother. And like most humans on the planet, she had no real idea what parenthood would mean.

Adams is wonderful at articulating with a gesture or a glance the loneliness and isolation, the weariness and guilt and self-loathing that can seep into days spent truly loving the tiny, filthy, needy little monster eating up every waking second of your life.

But in case you miss it, Heller’s script, penned with Rachel Yoder, allows her a number of alternative ways to beat you about the head and neck with it. These include voiceover narration as well as fantasy sequences where she screams at and slaps those who insult or underestimate her. Plus, of course, there’s the larger metaphor at work in which Mother embraces her inner bitch goddess and indeed turns into a feral dog at night.

Parenting is exhausting, especially if it’s not a truly shared responsibility. Society is set up to judge women whether they work or stay home, and no matter how their kids behave. Adams delivers a delightfully subversive take on motherhood and navigates tough material to carve out a sympathetic and funny character. But the metaphor itself—Heller’s touch with magical realism—weaken rather than strengthen the effort.

The real problems with Nightbitch, though, are all first world. These parents can afford to live in a big, spacious suburban neighborhood on one income. Mother’s artist friends can afford nannies, and her “Book Baby” mommies also all seem to flourish financially without a second income.

Which is to say that Mother’s choice to give up her career and stay home with her son, while fraught with self-sacrifice, feels more like privilege than burden since most parents have no such choice in front of them.

And if the problems are only for the wealthy, the solutions are equally out of reach for most audiences. Which makes it hard to root for Mother, no matter how truly (and characteristically) excellent Adams is.

New In Theaters, Slider

Good Neighbors

Leave a comment

A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood

by Hope Madden

My God, I love Fred Rogers.

I didn’t watch the show as a kid, preferring Under Dog, Scooby Doo and other dog-related animation. But the last time I cried, not from sadness but from gratitude and longing, was during Morgan Neville’s beautiful 2018 documentary, Won’t You Be My Neighbor?

I sobbed. In public.

When news reached the world that Mr. Rogers was due for a biopic, surely each of us realized in our own separate ways that Tom Hanks was A) perfect, and B) going to make us sob all over again.

No way that was just me.

Hanks doesn’t love Fred Rogers as much as he entirely accepts him, and that’s the magic of this performance. While the rest of us may look on Rogers and his deep, genuine and implausible goodness with suspicion or awe, it’s nearly impossible to accept him as one of us. Hanks does. He doesn’t plumb for human frailty, he takes Fred Rogers on Fred Rogers’s terms, and that’s why Tom Hanks has two Oscars already. His performance here is unerring, eerily so.

Truth be told, though, A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood is not really Fred’s story. Rather, Mr. Rogers is the transformative catalyst for cynical NY magazine writer Lloyd Vogel. Vogel is played by Matthew Rhys and loosely based on real-life journalist Tom Junod, whose Esquire article is the inspiration for the film.

Director Marielle Heller (Can You Ever Forgive Me?) structures the film much like an episode from Mr. Rogers Neighborhood, and that almost-surreal-but-not quality serves to underscore the absurdity of the situation as Lloyd sees it: Who is this guy? Is this really what he’s like?

That healthy skepticism and Rogers’s ability to break it down creates the thrust of the film, but it’s also a window for the audience to question, accept and then celebrate this lovely man.

With two films in two years, the late children’s programming icon is having quite a moment. It’s hard to be sad about that.

New In Theaters

Writers Unblocked

Leave a comment

Can You Ever Forgive Me?

by Hope Madden

People forget that Melissa McCarthy was nominate for an Oscar. It’s a stiff year for female leads, but she might just nab another nom for her turn as a misanthropic writer in the true story, Can You Ever Forgive Me?

A one-time best seller, author Lee Israel (McCarthy) is feeling her shelf life. Unwilling to conform to any kind of expectations—particularly those placed on females in the publishing industry—she finds herself facing the reality that no one wants a book on Fanny Brice, and no one wants a book by Lee Israel.

McCarthy’s socially inept and down-on-her-luck biographer sits in a dingy bar midday, drinking away her unemployability, her cat’s illness and her writer’s block when in beams a boozy ray of sunshine disguised as upbeat alcoholic hustler Jack Hock (Richard E. Grant).

It’s here that director Marielle Heller’s film hits its stride. McCarthy’s energy, her dimples and her infectious good nature have buoyed any number of mediocre films. But here, she carves a low key, solitary figure unable and unwilling to open up. It’s a fascinating about-face for McCarthy.

Set Israel’s curmudgeonliness against the unbridled zeal and charm Grant brings to his character, and a compelling odd-couple-on-the-skids is born.

To pay her bills and exercise her talent, Israel begins forging letters from literary icons and selling those forgeries at bookshops across New York. The wondrous respect this film has for writers, for the written and spoken word, and the nostalgia it has for a past when those elements were likewise revered generates a lovely, literary atmosphere.

Co-writer Nicole Holofcener again subverts ideas of entitlement and self-destruction with a screenplay so full of empathy it’s impossible to dislike the deeply unpleasant Israel.

A great deal of that success, of course, comes from McCarthy’s authenticity. The performance is nuanced and understated, as is the entire film, and aching of self-inflicted loneliness. She creates an believable and yet unusual character—one who embarks on a deeply strange yet somehow fitting journey.

The story of Lee Israel offers a weirdly optimistic if cautionary tale for misfit women. It’s also a great reminder that Melissa McCarthy can really act.