Amy Adams, stuffed into a second-hand crap dress that looked like it came from Sutton Foster's late nineties "audition attire" closet, flitted awkwardly across the screen in a number called "Me Party." It was an evening showing of the acceptably cute Muppet Movie that everyone was talking about for a minute.I noticed that Amy Adams, once identified comfortably as America's musical darling, was now a completely different person.
The difference between then and now? Then.. she wanted it.
There is nothing about Amy Adams that defines a different sort of struggle than any other delusional, empty actress on the vague and narrow climb to fame. She was pretty, kept her weight down, looked like just about anyone else in the industry that could play those parts, and could act and sing moderately well. But she lucked out, had an alliterative name, could pull off a film camera's closeup with the right amount of sleep, contouring, and lighting, and actually wanted it after she finally got it. This is why she was enjoyable to watch, and what made Enchanted such a fun film. It was her job to be bouncy, charismatic, and energetic... and our job to be lazy, tired, and entertained during a leisurely evening at the movies. This very relationship between her and America propelled her into a dizzying maze of the Hollywood shark tank, and into the notoriously brief and deranged status symbol known as "America's Sweetheart."
But inevitably, she stopped caring.
Once she received the international fame and accolades, she began to suffer from a syndrome associated with any fame-hungry, beautiful stage actress desperate for work in order to feed her ravenous hunger for a solution to her abysmal self-image. The years of eating dry ramen from the bag and auditioning obscure sixteen bar selections in a shithole LA apartment had finally come to an end as her "struggle to have a cultural experience." She had the money, the fame, the husband. So what else was there to do?
Well, she popped out a kid. Or two. I think it was just one. Who cares. This, of course, peppered between a string of forgettably quirky movies that were just barely worth the effort to show up for.
After this, something left her face. And while watching her robotic, auto-piloted performance in The Muppets, I found myself let down. Her pallid, creamy complexion now appeared to be the face of a mother running on very little sleep. Smoker's lines and crow's feet stretched out from the corners of her eyes, her smile now the widened plasticity of a senior portrait taken after a long night of crying. Her inability to lose the baby weight was less so a metabolic normality associated with aging and child-bearing, and more of a lack of desire to regain the enviably cookie-cutter silhouette of an ingenue straight off the pages of a Sondheim musical.But the most disturbing? Her eyes. The once happily-dense set of baby blues fraught with a blank sort of concerned apprehension have long since vanished. It seems almost as though Winifred Sanderson (or Bette Midler from Hocus Pocus) had sucked her soul out, leaving a carelessly vacant gaze that remained unchanged despite happiness, sadness, confusion, standing still, or dancing. Eyeliner and mascara, yes, of course, but it is difficult to enhance the window to a soul that has seemingly vacated.
While imdb tells me she has a string of movies coming out, doesn't it usually say that with just about everyone on there? I don't feel like she will ever be capable of a public meltdown, but she will eventually lose the will to be in front of the cameras until she needs the approval again. One day, after years, we will notice that she has been gone for a while after a slow and pretty fade-out into obscurity - but not, of course, without the accompanying statement loaded with a noncommittal type of sympathy:
"Oh yeah, I remember her in that princess movie... she was soo good in that..."
