Director: Marielle Heller
Writers: Marielle Heller, Rachel Yoder
Stars: Amy Adams, Scoot McNairy, Arleigh Snowden
Synopsis: A woman pauses her career to be a stay-at-home mom, but soon her domesticity takes a surreal turn.
“I feel like I’m stuck in a prison of my own creation … I’m deeply afraid I’m going to be smart, or happy, or thin ever again.” Mother (Amy Adams) internally answers the question of what it is like being a stay-at-home mom to a woman who she meets in the supermarket who now has her job in the city art gallery she used to run. Mother’s spoken answer is, “I love being a mom.”
Marielle Heller’s adaptation of Rachel Yoder’s novel Nightbitch imagines the loss of identity a middle-class woman experiences once she moves to the suburbs and takes on the role of ‘mother’ to her toddler son (Arleigh Patrick Snowden and Emmett James Snowden). Mother’s well-intentioned, but oblivious, husband (Scoot McNairy) is absent four days a week leaving Mother with only son for company. The routine of her life is consuming her; yet apart from Son’s sleep refusal, he’s a pleasant and lively little tyke. Mother understands that she chose her life, she quit her job, and they moved out of the city, but had she realized what having limited adult contact, and the impact of giving up her career as an artist (one she is too exhausted to contemplate) would do to her – she might have done something, she can’t yet define what, differently. She certainly wouldn’t have walked willingly into 1950s style suburban malaise.
Mother’s assumptions about other mommies keep her away from most daytime child friendly activities. Her horror of ‘Book Babies’ at the local library is rooted in her belief that other mommies blissfully love just being mommies. The idea of bonding with another woman simply because they have both given birth is pathetic in her mind. What do these women even talk about? Is it as mind-numbing as the repeated duck song played by the storyteller? If only she could find one sophisticated, beautiful, and interesting woman to talk to who hates it all as much as she does. Instead, she finds Jen (Zoë Chao), Miriam (Mary Holland), and Liz (Archana Rajan) who don’t make her feel like an alien from another planet. The alienation Mother feels comes from herself. The trio just laugh when Son loudly proclaims, “Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck,” in front of the group. Liz is fascinated by the fact that Mother is an artist. Jen knows what installation art is. Miriam used to be a stripper. They were all people in the ‘before time’ – before kids.”
“Giving birth changes you on a cellular level,” Mother says to the trio when she has begun to open up about her experiences. Chimerical cells travel from a fetus’ body into the mother. Those cells create a bond between mother and child that changes their very physiology. Mother had become resigned to the changes happening to her body. Playing with Son, he says, “Mamma fuzzy.” Mother goes to the bathroom and sees a patch of coarse hair on her lower back. She examines her face. “What fresh hell am I due today?” she asks. More grey hairs, more wrinkles, her figure no longer svelte. Strange body hair barely raises her eyebrows, but her teeth seem sharper too. Also, why is she suddenly able to smell everything so clearly? “I guess that’s where we’re at,” she says but she does mention feeling different to Husband who jokes with her. The jokes stop when Mother loses her temper with Husband as he snores through Son’s restlessness in their bed. “Can you not hear him? Would you fucking do something?” Husband is blithely ignoring Mother’s dissatisfaction because she has turned so much of it in upon herself. She is not a good mother if she complains. She was the one who decided to quit her job. Husband is surprised when she snaps at him. She acted like a bitch. Maybe that’s what she is, a Nightbitch. As he’s taking an Uber to the airport for another four days away, he tells her she should make a schedule and reminds her “Happiness is a choice” – in her mind she slaps his face. In reality she smiles weakly and nods.
Something is happening to Nightbitch. She’s recalling her childhood in a Quaker community and the deep sadness that surrounded her own mother. And she is changing – at least in her dreams. Dogs come up to her at the playground and she takes Son with her to chase them. She remembers her grandmother cooking or perhaps casting spells in Pennsylvanian Dutch. She goes to the library and asks Norma (Jessica Harper) for a book on women and animals, or women turning into animals. Norma hands her a book of ethnographic mythology titled, ‘A Field Guide to Magical Women’ where she reads about the bird women of Peru and Dog goddesses. Nightbitch imagines herself flying.
Nightbitch finds herself ravenously hungry in the supermarket. She begins playing “doggies” with Son. She wolfs down her food court meal directly from the container – people stare but she doesn’t stop. Norma comes over to her table and says it’s so much fun having a son and playing games. She joins in the barking. Nightbitch is surprised she has children and wants to ask her how she got through it all – did she work when they were young? Nightbitch is desperate for some kind of wisdom, some assurance that she’s not cracked. She can’t ask her mother who is deceased. The dreams she has – if they are dreams – are of a pack of dogs stripping her of her clothing and bringing her tributes.
Marielle Heller remains coy on whether Nightbitch is turning into a dog or if she’s simply connecting to something ‘primal’ within herself which rejects the sameness of suburban living and allows her to release a long held in howl. Heller’s use of Yoder’s prose as Nightbitch’s internal monologue affords Amy Adams some lyrical and sometimes raw insights into motherhood and the state of being for women. Women who have extinguished their own flames and wildness by sanitising the experience of their bodies. Bodies that can grow human beings. Bodies so powerful they create life. Bodies that give until they are empty. Protect, nurture, attack. Bodies on the edge of exhaustion. Animals run on instinct, but as Nightbitch she can run free – growl, snap, bite, and nuzzle – and decide who is allowed in her territory.
While there are some salient points about the continued struggle women encounter with social expectations of what a ‘mother’ should be in a certain stratum of society, Heller’s film is firmly entrenched in privilege. Nightbitch wants to be an artist and a mother. She wants to find her pack – no longer her inner-city graduate school friends with their conceptual art and expensive lifestyles. Maybe her pack is the other suburban moms who also ache to not let their flames be extinguished by permanent caregiving. Perhaps they too hear the call of the wild and become ‘Baby Yoga Moms Who Run With Labradors.’ Nightbitch and the other mommies in her circle don’t need to worry about how they’re going to pay the bills, or whether they have secure housing, or deal with violence or physical abuse. They’re quite literally wine moms who go hiking and have the money to go to therapy if they choose.
The penultimate scene of the film where Nightbitch, Husband, and Son play together in a cushion filled outdoor blanket fort/tent in a neatly forested park denotes how sanitised Heller’s film is at its heart. Nightbitch flirts with the animalistic but refrains from sinking its teeth too deeply into female ferity.
Nightbitch makes observations about, and comments with purpose on, the inherent violence of childbirth and how (in optimum circumstances) despite the pain, the blood, the sweat, piss, and tears involved in bringing a human being into the world the instinct is to immediately love the person who just tore a women’s body open. Nightbitch never regrets being a mother, she adores Son, she simply needs to be more than Mother.
Amy Adams, like Nightbitch, is reclaiming her art. After a string of disappointing performances in disappointing films, Nightbitch is her best role and performance in dog’s years. Scoot McNairy is well cast as Husband – a man who loves his family and wants to support Nightbitch but too often uses the “If you don’t tell me precisely what you want and need, I don’t know how to intuit it” excuse a little too often. Husband is not a bad man, but he is one who says he is babysitting his own son. Nightbitch, because of its tame nature will appeal to a broader audience than if it leaned harder into transgression and the “monster/mother” themes it purports to investigate. ‘Educated white woman gets a bit dirty and has a breakdown in her nice neighborhood, then insists on equitable parenting and finding her joy as a woman/mother/person/artist’ and lets her son eat out of dog bowls and sleep in a dog bed isn’t exactly she-werewolf tears out the throat of the capitalist patriarchy leaving a trail of dead bodies in her wake. Nightbitch may not be excoriating and revolutionary, but it is often funny and mildly cathartic as tame feminist allegory.
