At the Sea review: Amy Adams is Oscar-worthy in this fearless drama about alcoholism ★★★★☆
ATS ProductionThe actress makes a return to form in this hard-hitting film from Hungarian director Kornél Mundruczó about a middle-aged woman facing up to addiction – and her traumatic childhood.
Amy Adams is a transfixing screen actress, but she's had a bad run of it lately: her last truly successful project was a TV one, 2018's Sharp Objects, while films like execrable potboiler The Woman in the Window and clunky suburban satire Nightbitch have come and gone without much noise. So it's great to report that she is given a chance to showcase her prodigious gifts again in At the Sea, the latest English-language film from Hungarian director Kornél Mundruczó, which has premiered at the Berlin Film Festival.
The role of a recovering alcoholic reassessing her life is an ideal showcase for her special kind of fearless openness as a performer. Indeed, having been nominated for an Oscar six times but never won, Adams deserves to be in contention for a seventh nod with this performance.
The drama is the second in a loose triptych of films by Mundruczó dealing with women in crisis at different stages in life: the first, 2020's Pieces of a Woman, starring Vanessa Kirby, dealt with a young woman coping with the loss of a child. Now he has turned to middle-age, and the focus here is on a painful psychological trade-off that feels particularly pertinent to mid-life: when a person comes to really understand the damage of their upbringing, but also how they may be impacting others with that in turn.
Adams is Laura, the daughter of a famous choreographer who was once a dancer herself, and has now taken over his dance company; we meet her as she is finishing a stint in rehab. When she's picked up at the airport by her teenage daughter Josie (Chloe East), the role reversal is notable, with the latter affecting the weariness of a harried parent dealing with a wayward child. When they then get back to their picturesque Cape Cod home, her husband Martin (The White Lotus's Murray Bartlett) and son Felix (Redding Munsell) treat her with similar distrust.
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The reason for this becomes clear eventually: Laura had a car accident while drunk, with Felix in the car, and though he wasn't physically injured, he was left traumatised. Up to that point, she recounts to a sympathetic stranger (played by Ted Lasso's Brett Goldstein) she meets on the beach, "I was a good drunk… funny, giddy, charming" – but this terrifying what-if has forced her to consider her deep-rooted unhappiness. Some slightly clunky dream sequences and flashbacks featuring her childhood self show where that springs from: her abusive, uncaring, addict father.
At the Sea
Director: Kornél Mundruczó
Cast: Amy Adams, Murray Bartlett, Chloe East, Dan Levy, Brett Goldstein
Run-time: 1hr 52m
Adams may have the most remarkably expressive eyes – big, blue and limpid – of any Hollywood star, and her gift for expressing a range of emotions through them, often all in quick succession, is put to great use here. Such transparency is also perfect for a character who is depicted as connected to herself like never before: it's a knotty fact that this horrific near-tragedy seems to have provided Laura with such a valuable epiphany, even as it has scarred the people she loves the most. As the initially exasperated but finally forgiving Josie, East gives an intensely embodied performance to match her more famous co-star: a highlight comes when she responds to her parents arguing by breaking into an extraordinary, convulsive dance, that serves simultaneously as a release, an attack, and an assertion of her own great talent.
It's undoubtedly true that with its highly privileged social milieu and chic interiors, At the Sea could be caricatured as another "rich people have problems too" drama. But the depth of feeling in Adams' characterisation of Laura taps into something much more universal. May this be the beginning of a real comeback for her.
★★★★☆
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