In Praise of Amy Adams

Movies: Toronto International Film Festival

A veteran movie critic spends the day with Amy Adams and concludes she’s Oscar bait, as well as a reminder of what Nicole Kidman used to look like before Botox

By Jay Stone

TORONTO — Let us now praise Amy Adams, and all who sail on her. I recently spent a morning with the actress — she was on screen in two movies at the Toronto International Film Festival and I was in the audience, but still — and I concluded that a) she reminds me of what Nicole Kidman would look like if she had more common sense, and b) she might be in line for a couple of Oscar nominations this fall for roles in which she plays troubled women in unhappy second marriages with doomed daughters but, nonetheless, beautiful houses with large windows overlooking vastly photogenic scenery.

Both movies — Nocturnal Animals and Arrival — have all that in them, but Adams herself couldn’t be more different and you have to remind yourself that she was also, among other things, a persuasive princess in Enchanted, a good nun in Doubt (all nuns are good of course. I mean a well-played nun), an uncommitted con artist in American Hustle, and a convincing artist in Big Eyes. She’s always strong, and while I’m not sure people run to the theatre to see movies because Amy Adams is in them, in fact they should. Smarten up.

Nocturnal Animals is directed by Tom Ford, the fashion designer who astonished everyone (i.e. me) by making the sad and layered drama A Single Man. This new movie is even more astonishing, especially the opening sequence in which a group of grossly obese women dance naked in cheerleader outfits. Everyone who thought the German film Toni Erdmann was filled with unpredictable delights should spend five minutes with Tom Ford to have their amazement meters re-calibrated.

The women, it turns out, are part of an art installation in a gallery owned by Susan (Adams), a would-be artist who didn’t have the gumption. She’s married to her second husband, a handsome rake (played by Armie Hammer) who cheats on her, and she is living a life that has an artificial sheen of junk — Susan’s word — despite the slick set design and gorgeous clothes with which Ford dresses everyone, from the runway to the movie set.

One day, Susan gets a surprise package in the mail: the manuscript of a novel written by her first husband Edward (Jake Gyllenhaal), a sensitive writer whom she married despite warnings from her mother (Laura Linney) that he was weak. She eventually divorces him because he is weak — the peril of turning into one’s own mother is one of the themes of Nocturnal Animals — but now he has shown some gumption by finishing a book.

His fictional story, about a family being menaced on the highway by three toughs with rape on their minds, is almost unwatchably intense, and certainly more involving than the art gallery world that is the movie’s putative reality. The plot moves back and forth between them, played out by various versions of its various characters, and it becomes a mystery whose main enigma is that old puzzler, the human heart.

A brief lunch (cold samosas, cheese and crackers, granola bars) outside the Princess of Wales theatre and it’s time to troop in for our second feature. Arrival is directed by Denis Villeneuve, the Quebec film-maker who has managed to meld an indie Canadian sensibility and intelligence with American excitement: he is also the man behind Incendies, Prisoners, and Sicario, among others. He’s the best director in the country.

In Arrival, Adams plays Louise, a linguist who is called on when 12 spaceships land on various spots around the globe and governments need someone to translate the creaky, bellowing language of the aliens.

Louise and Ian (Jeremy Renner), a physicist, enter a long, oval spacecraft — it resembles the Hindenberg turned on its side, or maybe an extra-large zucchini — and make contact with the octopus-like creatures whose language is actually expressed in ink blots that they squeeze out of their arms: the words look like giant, fluid coffee stains.

Arrival is a brilliantly constructed puzzle that touches on many arcane topics, including how our brains are shaped by our speech, and unfolds in a framing story involving Louise and a young daughter who dies in the first reel. By the end, it has become a moving examination, not of intergalactic travel, but of family: it’s a reminder that the best science fiction puts its speculations in the service of human nature.

Despite the many similarities — including the fact that each film is exactly an hour and 56 minutes long — Adams creates vivid and different characters. Indeed, she must split her performances in four, because both Susan and Louise are shown in younger and older versions. The elasticity of time is another of the themes of the films, especially of Nocturnal Animals, and it turns out to be a very touching. It was a very satisfying day. Cold samosas aren’t bad, by the way.

The Toronto International Film Festival runs September 8-18, check back with The Ex-Press for daily updates. And maybe free chips.