I don't really want to have an argument about whether Amy Adams is the greatest actress of her generation. As far as I can see, there's not really much to debate at this point. She can do and has done anything and everything—broad comedy, kids' movies, ensemble pieces, superhero films—and has been better than everybody else in them. Her five Oscar nominations show her range in the prestige category: Junebug, Doubt, The Fighter, The Master, and American Hustle. She's not particularly interesting as a celebrity, which may be why she's had to wait for so long to be recognized for her talent. Nobody cares when she goes to a party. Nobody cares what she wears on red carpets. But she is more or less invisible as a public personality exactly because she is such a great actress. Her soul is malleable. She can become whom she likes.
The Academy loves to snub great actors—look at Robert Redford, who won his only Oscar for directing Ordinary People (his win over Martin Scorsese for Raging Bull remains controversial three decades later)—but this year I think they may find it hard to do it again with Adams. She has two films on offer—Denis Villeneuve's Arrival, a more interesting version of last year's The Martian, and Nocturnal Animals, Tom Ford's meditation on being rich and bored. She is utterly superb in both. The question is not whether Adams deserves an Oscar—the question is: for which film?
In Nocturnal Animals, Adams plays Susan--a distracted Los Angeles art dealer with too much money and a great deal of anxiety over whether she will have too much money in the near future. Susan reads a great deal. The plot of Nocturnal Animals, such as it is, alternates between her difficult marriage and a novel written by her ex-husband, also called Nocturnal Animals. The novel is a vaguely Western story about a man whose wife and daughter are murdered during a trip through West Texas.
Director Tom Ford is many things, but one thing he is not is a storyteller. The script for Nocturnal Animals would not survive a first-year seminar at any random film school. But that's not the point. Nocturnal Animals isn't really a film. It's more like a feature-length perfume ad. A beautiful woman walks up a set of stairs and then vanishes and then appears at the top of the stairs—that sort of thing, but for 116 minutes. I half-expected "Nocturnal Animals: Available at Nordstrom" to appear on the screen.
And yet Adams is terrific in this movie. Unforgettable even. Even when she's crying in scenes that are just plain silly, you believe her. She has nothing interesting to say in this movie, but she says those nothings in the most interesting way imaginable. Adams is entering—yes, I'm going to say it—Meryl Streep territory. She can take films that you would otherwise never want to see and make them required viewing.
With Arrival, Adams is given actual material to work with, and the results are glorious. This is the movie you're going to be taking everybody to see in November to recover from the election. Adams plays a linguist who is confronted by the arrival of an alien species and has to figure out how to communicate with them. The aliens are "heptapods," giant spider-like things with seven legs who write in huge, slightly differentiated circles. It's an oddly intellectual movie for a sci-fi thriller, but watching Adams figure out this language is like reading a riddle with narrative drive. Her communication of intellectual curiosity is the key to the film.
These two films in tandem make this season the best ever for Adams. Whether she will win an Oscar is impossible to say, of course, since the Academy Awards pretty much always makes the wrong choice. I doubt for her that there will be a sudden burst of recognition as with Matthew McConaughey and the McConaissance. She hasn't really had a bad or embarrassing period in her career to recover from. For a decade now, she had been appearing in a steadily accruing collection of better and better films. There is no grand story here except the story of a working actress improving. And so yet again she makes a terrible celebrity—bland and decent Amy Adams, just about perfect in anything.
