No one would object to the whole “trad wife” movement if the message weren’t an implicit “Sit down and shut up, ladies.” You have accomplished women speaking to young women in educational contexts, telling them that they should not seek professional accomplishment, but rather dedicate themselves to hearth, home, and husband. When such women are addressing their juniors, it carries an inevitable whiff of “Hey, I’ve managed to crash the boys’ club… but I’m closing the trap door behind me.”
When it’s delivered by men, of course, we have entered that realm in which insecurity, incels, misogyny, and the basic desire to want to feel superior to somebody commingle. It’s been a long time since most men wanted women to have fewer rights or options because they think they are helpless, inferior, incapable, etc. Now it’s pretty transparently because, let’s face it, it’s nice to be born “superior,” whether via gender, race, wealth, or whatever. Having that advantage removed by a more level playing field means you’ve got to face your own mediocrity, not to mention the fact that nobody is guaranteeing you a career or a life partner. You might have to compete for those things.
These have seemed such basic realities for at least the last half-century or so, it’s depressing to face the fact that related ideas require introduction to whole new generations. You know, the ones that never experienced “feminism” as anything but a pejorative, yet can feel The Handmaid’s Tale gaining real-world credibility every passing week. Will we reach a point where not becoming a “trad wife” is again a mark of personal failure (or worse, undesirability), as society largely considered it in grandma’s time? Where pay equity between genders is considered somehow anti-nuclear family? How fast and how far can progress reverse itself? Pretty fast, it seems, if you consider that just a few years ago Roe v. Wade seemed unlikely to fall… and now we’re seeing an incoming White House cabinet of eminences who arrive garlanded in a fragrant bouquet of past sexual harassment and assault accusations.
It’s within that grim political context that I wanted to be more enthused about Nightbitch, a movie whose message no doubt needs to be heard now. Still, it’s a little dismaying that it’s pretty much the same exact message we got 50-plus years ago in Diary of a Mad Housewife, Up the Sandbox, and other 1970s movies in which women were cautiously assured it might be all right to do something other than, or in addition to, being the maid of constant sorrow to demanding children and an unappreciative husband.
The “having it all” conclusion to this gimmicky yet weirdly elemental story feels so retro: As played by Scoot McNairy, the grossly insensitive spouse Richard Benjamin essayed in Housewife abruptly morphs into the newly improved, sharing and caring partner personified by Kris Kristofferson (1974’s Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore) and Alan Bates (1978’s An Unmarried Woman). That metamorphosis allows our heroine to fulfill her creative self—conveniently, here, she was already a successful artist before motherhood interrupted. For all its on-the-nose verbal arguments about restrictive gender roles, Nightbitch ultimately provides solutions as pat as in any romcom.
Naturally, it helps that Amy Adams is playing our heroine, a nameless suburbanite who volunteered to give up her career and be a stay-at-home-mom in the suburbs after giving birth to a first child referred to onscreen only as “Son.” (This kid, whose none-too-scripted performance is a highlight throughout, is played by identical twins Arleigh and Emmett Snowdon.) But McNairy’s Husband has some corporate job that requires him to travel a lot, leaving the still-fairly-new mommy and her adorable but high-maintenance two-year-old home alone in the ‘burbs most of the time. Sleep-deprived, lacking any evident support network—she initially claims to dislike the company of fellow mothers—this particular mom is, when we first meet her, already about to lose her freakin’ mind.
As with the delusions suffered by a similarly stressed-out Charlize Theron in the Diablo Cody-written Tully six years ago (a much better movie), we are not particularly surprised when Adams’ Mother begins experiencing things that are a little… odd. Neighborhood canines begin taking an unusual interest, as if she were leader of their pack. She grows hair in unexpected places, detects the beginnings of a tailbone, then nipples that are, well, surplus. This is taken as affirmation that motherhood brings out the inner “animal,” though the line between metaphor and “monster” gets pretty blurry by the time a cat actually gets mauled to death.
Just how literally are we supposed to take her transformation? It’s not at all clear, particularly since in the end Mother’s mutt-dom is really beside the point, more digression than integral to any thesis. There are flirtations with Wicca-adjacent content in the form of winky appearances by a badly underutilized Jessica Harper as a sage librarian, and a trio of maternal peers (Zoe Chao, Mary Holland, Archana Rajan) meant to equate with the three stray dogs that keep following Adams around. But all that stuff goes nowhere in particular; perhaps it was better woven into the fabric of Rachel Yoder’s source novel. Likewise, we’re in half-hearted satirical territory with the portrait of the heroine’s erstwhile urban art-scene colleagues as stereotypically vacuous, affected snobs. Yet there’s not a hint of irony to the climactic triumph of her wowing them all with a one-woman gallery show of (pretty bad) art baldly inspired by all the recent identity crises.
Also a producer, Adams excels at bringing an edge of loopy comedy to desperation, a skill perfectly utilized here. But the material is more trite than she deserves, the messiness it promises too soon resolving in cuteness, and the ultimate wish-fulfillment of having a spouse gush “I’m in fucking awe of you.” Nightbitch is a disappointment from Marielle Heller, whose prior features The Diary of a Teenage Girl and Can You Ever Forgive Me? granted their heroines more satisfying complexity in both internal character and exterior circumstance. (She also directed the Mr. Rogers biopic A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood, which perhaps had more reason to be a bit blandly affirmational than this latest.) It’s not a bad film, but it promises an edge of danger than turns out to be toothless. Then again, maybe reactionary times call for simplistic treatments of yesteryear’s progressive ideas, requiring a spoonful of sugar to help the even the old medicine of second-wave feminism go down. Yikes. Nightbitch opens in theaters nationwide Fri/6.
Taking their fantasy conceits considerably further are a new animated feature and a newly-restored obscurity, both from former Soviet bloc nations. Latvian director Gints Zilbalodis’ Flow (which opens Fri/6 at area theaters including the Roxie and Metreon) is a wordless adventure that soft-pedals its environmental message—though we can safely assume there is a statement being made here about global warming. In a forest, a black cat residing in an abandoned house steals a fish caught by some stray dogs. Their ensuing chase is interrupted by a flash flood. Eventually, the cat, one of the dogs, a ring-tailed lemur, a capybara (the South American rodent resembling a guinea pig) and a long-limbed white secretarybird all end up in a stray boat, predators and prey forced to share space in order to stay afloat above an at least temporarily drowned world.
The photorealist approach Zilbalodis uses here isn’t really a personal favorite among animation styles, and the central conceit is really no more than The Incredible Journey redux, different species anthropomorphized to suit a contrived narrative and become the bestest friends ever. But still, as pure physical action movie with unusual (as well as improbable) protagonists, Flow is hard to resist. It is that rare movie not just suitable, but actually palatable, “for all ages.”
Not for kids is The Savage Hunt of King Stakh, a 1979 adaptation of a 1964 novel by Uladzimir Karatkeivich, a leading literary figure in Latvia’s neighboring nation, Belarus—these days perhaps best known as Europe’s last dictatorship. This elaborate Gothic phantasmagoria centers on a young man (Boris Plotnikov) lost in a storm who seeks shelter at an isolated manse. Though initially barred, he’s invited in by the lady of the house, a wan aristocrat (Elena Dimitrova) who’s the last in a line she says has been cursed for 20 generations. A dwarf, a duel, ghosts, rival suitors, and a gruesome hunt surface in the convoluted narrative, which is not necessarily intended to make “sense,” but to have a dreamlike near-logic.
Set in the late 19th century but with a timeless wild streak, crossing an Edward Gorey ambiance with regional folkloricism, Valeri Rubinchik’s visually striking production was not especially liked by Karatkeivich himself. He felt the emphasis on fantastical images and atmospherics came at the expense of his implicit political-historical critique, which indeed isn’t very tangible here. Still, the simultaneously antic and macabre effect will please anyone with a taste for foreign fairy tales and cinematic surrealism. Restored to a longer runtime than it’s been available in for many years, the film becomes available exclusively on specialty streaming platform OVID on December 10.
Finally, a couple notable new documentaries draw a direct line between music and activism. Johan Grimonprez’s Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat uses vintage jazz and Afropop to drive its sprawling 150-minute overview of very dirty Cold War-era politics—in particular how the combined efforts of the CIA, private Western industries, wealthy arts patrons, diplomats, and the United Nations itself conspired against the escalating independence of African nations from imperialist exploiters. That culminated in the overthrow and assassination of Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba, whose Congo homeland had survived horrific abuse under Belgian colonization to commence shaky new life as a free republic.
Some of this tangled, globetrotting skullduggery was hidden by the “smokescreen” of US performers like Louie Armstrong, Nina Simone, and Dizzy Gillespie touring as “goodwill ambassadors” around the world, thinking they were spreading democracy and free speech. When they realized how baldly they’d been manipulated, some 60 African-American activists—including Abbey Lincoln, Max Roach, and Maya Angelou—stormed the UN Security Council meeting to shout “Murderers! Killers! Slave drivers!” before being violently ejected. Using its stellar soundtrack as an editorial guide, turning indictment into something grotesque and ironic, this is a driven, engrossing expose with a beat you can dance to. It opens at SF’s Roxie on Thu/5 (more info here).
Playing just this Sat/7 at BAMPFA in Berkeley is The 9 Lives of Barbara Dane (more info here), a more conventionally crafted documentary about a most unconventional woman. Dane, who passed away just weeks ago in Oakland at age 97, was a white singer of blues, folk, and jazz whose outspoken progressive politics and refusal to observe any color lines probably limited her showbiz career.
Not that she cared: She agitated on behalf of unions, played with Armstrong, opened a blues club in North Beach, recorded with the Chambers Brothers, went to Mississippi during “Freedom Summer,” toured “The Fuck the Army Show” to protest the Vietnam War with Jane Fonda and SF Mime Troupe, started a record label to release music of international liberation movements, had three kids (and three husbands), etc. etc. Maureen Gosling’s film captures her in busy later life, at one point reviewing her voluminous FBI files…. which she pronounces “Quite amusing to me.” The director and two producers will be present for a post-screening discussion at the afternoon show.
