Amy Adams Gives a Ferocious Turn in Ode to Moms

It’s been more than half a century since Helen Reddy sang, “I am woman, hear me roar!” but the line remains as good a mantra as any for Amy Adams’ ferocious lead performance in Marielle Heller’s tamer-than-expected “Nightbitch.” Identified only as “Mother” in the credits, Adams plays a woman who gave up her career to raise her son, but is only now, four years in to stay-at-home motherhood, realizing just how much the experience has changed her. “Transformed” might actually be a better word, since her primeval awakening gives off serious werewolf-movie vibes. This mother believes she might be turning into a dog.

Novelist Rachel Yoder opens “Nightbitch” with the words “for my mom & for all the moms.” To some, that might sound like a warning — “male readers (and childless cat ladies) not welcome here” — when in fact, the dedication doubles as a sort of prescription. Instead of expecting women to reinvent the proverbial wheel, “Nightbitch” ought to be required viewing “for all the moms.” Like Yoder’s book, Heller’s bitingly literal adaptation operates on the premise that motherhood is something primal and instinctive, a universal experience that binds humans to other wild animals. But it’s also a strangely well-kept secret which obliges women to navigate its challenges alone.

While a thousand mommy bloggers and maternity book authors have dedicated their lives to demystifying the experience, “Nightbitch” speaks to all those mothers who missed the memo. That seems to be the case for Adams’ Mother, who’s understandably overwhelmed. While her sympathetic but none-too-attentive husband (Scoot McNairy) disappears for days on end, she runs herself ragged raising their Son (towheaded twins Arleigh Patrick Snowdon and Emmett James Snowdon alternate in the role).

Mother can’t remember the last time she got a good night’s sleep. She feeds the boy, cleans his messes and accompanies him to the park and library, where she can hardly relate to the other moms — which is strange, since three of them (Zoë Chao, Ella Thomas and Mary Holland) are friendly enough and communicate with knowing looks, as if motherhood has inducted them all to the same cult. But Adams’ character doesn’t much enjoy their company, which only makes her isolation that much more acute.

When she does interact with other moms, Mother immediately jumps to subjects “nobody talks about” (e.g. “Nobody talks about the change that happens on a cellular level”). Is that really a secret, or is she just cut off from conversation? On nights when Father’s gone, she doesn’t even speak to him on the phone. And she never goes near a computer. When it comes time for research, she asks the librarian (a cryptically wise Jessica Harper) not for an instruction manual on motherhood, but “A Field Guide to Magical Women,” featuring chapters on the “bird women of Peru” and so forth.

While consistently entertaining, “Nightbitch” wildly overstates how “misunderstood” mothers are. Not all cultures are so insensitive to their sacrifice — though that’s just what frustrates this particular victim of the patriarchy. Sinking her teeth into Mother the way Mother herself might a bloody steak, Adams courageously embodies Mother’s exasperation, finding the comedy in every setback. In Adams’ hands, Mother turns her identity crisis — the way the woman she was before “died in childbirth,” leaving someone even she doesn’t recognize in her place — into a tour-de-force act of reinvention.

In a voiceover that sounds an awful lot like America Ferrera’s “Barbie” monologue, slowed down and parceled out over the entire running time, Adams articulates all that this woman — who used to be an artist and curator in the city, reduced to finger-painting with a 4-year-old in the suburbs — finds to be unfair about motherhood itself: “How many men have delayed their greatness while their women didn’t know what to do with theirs?” Like that “Barbie” speech, Heller’s narration is at once obvious, incontrovertible and still sorely in need of saying.

The truth is, society celebrates motherhood, but it doesn’t do nearly enough to support it (whether that means giving too little maternity leave or Mother’s constant struggle to convince Father to carry some of her burden). That’s not exactly breaking news, and yet, the enormous responsibility that “Nightbitch” dramatizes rarely appears in movies, unless it’s a single dad having to figure out (à la “Mr. Mom” or “Mrs. Doubtfire”). Here, Adams allows herself to appear almost haggard. What makeup Heller gives her star simply makes her look more harried … or simply hairier, as when she notices soft white fur sprouting from her lower back and “whiskers” near the corners of her lips.

That’s the first sign that there may be lycanthropic changes afoot. Clue number two occurs on the playground, when she inexplicably attracts a trio of random dogs. The next thing she knows, the neighborhood mutts are leaving offerings on her doorstep, where her son finds a dead rat and fresh “poop.” At times, though it was adapted from a supernatural fable, “Nightbitch” can feel more like a cross between a memoir and a self-help book, as when Mother recalls scenes from her childhood.

She feels a connection now to her own mom — “& all the moms” — remembering (or else imagining) a night when she disappeared into the forest, scampering off on all fours like a “nightbitch.” Mother introduces that word as a joke to her husband one morning, and it proceeds to metastasize in her imagination. But Heller intends to comfort more than to freak us out. This isn’t a horror film so much as a healthy allegory for anyone who feels differently after having a child.

When Mother finally does transform on camera — a nifty case of shape-shifting, focused on her back, feet and tail — she’s expressing both a connection to the animal kingdom and a desire to escape from her parental duties, if only for a few hours at a time. A well-written argument between Mother and Father leads the couple to declare some time apart, and in the hours when he has custody, she starts to create again. Once you get past the surrealism, “Nightbitch” turns out to be a surprisingly straightforward story with a pat and rather predictable message — a guide for domesticated sheep in werewolf-movie clothing.