Amy Adams Is Having a Moment

Sometimes a moment comes along that shoots a relatively popular star completely into the stratosphere.  Pretty Woman took Julia Roberts from promising actress to, well, Julia Roberts.  Jennifer Lawrence had the one-two punch of The Hunger Games and X-Men: First Class.  For Amy Adams, that moment...kind of already happened.  

Let me rewind.  The first time I remember paying attention to Adams was in 2002.  In the excellent Spielberg-DiCaprio true-life caper Catch Me If You Can, she played a teenage nurse who DiCaprio's Frank Abagnale Jr. accidentally falls in love with as he cons his way across the country.  Adams had this infectious giddy vulnerability to her performance that made you immediately understand why Abagnale would risk everything to try to make a life with her.  Although it was a small part, Adams made it feel bigger, and at that point only time stood between her and her big breakout role.

Sure enough, less than five years later, Adams knocked it out of the park with a star-making turn in Enchanted.  The movie was a four-quadrant crowd-pleaser from Disney that scored with both critics and audiences.  It holds a 93% positive rating on Rotten Tomatoes, and it made over $340 million worldwide.  So, why then didn't Adams become a huge movie star right then?  Her next few films did fine enough, but she wasn't on the tip of everyone's tongue.  She didn't become Julia Roberts.  And after that, most of her films were ensembles where she was regularly excellent, but would often just be one great performance among many.  Where were her $100 million star vehicles?  I think the answer is two-fold.

For one, her performance in Enchanted, while great, was overshadowed by the film's high-concept.  There's animation, dragons, special-effects, Patrick Dempsey, all manner of distractions.  She also disappeared so completely into the role that people may have been caught unawares seeing her play anyone else.  The other part of the answer may be a simple lack of interest in whatever was being offered.  Right when Adams had enough power after Enchanted to be the next big thing, she retreated into small awards-bait films like Doubt and indie movies like Sunshine Cleaning.  If we can learn anything from Adams' choices it's that she seems to pick projects that interest her without thinking too hard about the box office.  

So Adams made her ensembles, slowly building her clout as an actress (she's been nominated for five Academy Awards, and her films have a combined gross of over $2 billion), biding her time until something great came along that would put her front and center.  Enter Denis Villeneuve and Tom Ford.  Villeneuve is another breakout star in waiting.  He's directed four feature films (Incendies, Enemy, Prisoners, and Sicario), all of which are way better than they had any right to be (A "Back Catalog Review" of Sicario will be coming up shortly.  Spoilers - it's excellent).  His and Adams' new movie, Arrival, should catch the current surge in popularity of intelligent big-budget science fiction event films like Gravity and Interstellar.  The buzz on this thing is unreal.  Not only is it currently at 100% positive on Rotten Tomatoes with fifty reviews and an average rating of 8.7 out of 10, but there has been serious chatter that it might be awards-level great in addition to its blockbuster bonafides.  If this sure-fire hit weren't enough, Adams also teamed up with director Tom Ford to make Nocturnal Animals, and at the risk of sounding like a broken record, this movie's buzz is phenomenal and after its release in December, it will probably be a multi-nominee contender come awards season.

If Arrival and Nocturnal Animals are as great as everyone is saying, and assuming Arrival will finally be the next-level hit for which Villeneuve is due, then Amy Adams is about to become one of the biggest movie stars on the planet.  I, for one, can't wait.