At the Sea Review: Amy Adams Plays It Overly Straight in Insufferable Upper-Middle-Class Drama
Shame, healing, and personal growth dominate the narrative in this humorless, self-adoring, and vapid exploration of an artistic and narcissistic Cape Cod family. At the Sea presents a quite unbearable curation of first-world problems starring Amy Adams, crafted by screenwriter Kata Wéber and her husband, director Kornél Mundruczó.
A Solemn and Narcissistic Tale
These film-makers, known for challenging and interesting material in the past, now pivot to a solemn, narcissistic story. It is couched in self-forgiving, self-adoring rhetoric, all about upper-middle-class artistic folk in the United States yearning for wellness and recovery in their lovely Cape Cod home. The movie invites its audience to believe in the alleged talent and importance of its artistic characters while extending submissive empathy to their inter-generational psychic wounds.
Amy Adams portrays Laura, the grownup daughter of a supposedly brilliant dance company director, now deceased and remembered in epiphanic childhood memory-glimpses. This genius figure had close-cropped grey hair, a black polo neck, and functioning alcoholism. Laura inherited his dance passion and his boozing, now running his world-renowned company with an uncertain hand. She has just returned from rehab after drunk-driving and crashing while her young son Felix, played by Redding Munsell, was in the car. Thankfully, they were not hurt, but the film spends its entirety without showing a flashback to this dramatic event that might depict Laura in a bad or interesting light.
Family Dynamics and Artistic Pretensions
Shame, healing, and personal growth in a lovely setting are the order of the day. Laura's artist husband Martin, portrayed by Murray Bartlett, is angry yet concerned, and we are supposed to believe his paintings are good. Their teen daughter Josie, played by Chloe East and also a super-talented dancer, is angry and hurt. Wealthy friend George, a business sponsor of the company and portrayed by Rainn Wilson, supplies the angry-yet-concerned combo. Laura's witty gay assistant Peter, played by Dan Levy, is angry-and-concerned at the way she has neglected the company during her secret rehab stint. Martin had claimed her absence was a research trip among the Indigenous dancers of Bali, a touch that in a less humorless film might generate some incidental entertainment.
Amy Adams' Performance and Film's Tone
The very first sight of Amy Adams' face is a closeup of her expression of dignified suffering and self-knowledge as she participates in an entirely preposterous drumming-therapy session. This becomes the default facial expression for the entire film. She will laugh or, at one stage, cry with mortification after yet again neglecting Felix's wellbeing, allowing him to be stung by jellyfish and requiring help from a dishy recovering addict who now flies kites on the beach. Basically, it is that same deadly serious and solemn expression, far from the brilliant and lively performances Adams is known for. To top it all off, the family has money worries, not as other mortals know them, and might have to sell the lovely Cape Cod house.
These complacent bores pursue their issues to an uninteresting quasi-catharsis, with Laura and Josie actually performing some impromptu modern dance together on the beach, resulting in an uncomfortable spectacle. At the Sea screened at the Berlin film festival, adding to its festival circuit presence but failing to impress with its overly straight and insufferable approach.
