One of Hollywood’s most versatile actors, all of Amy Adams’s transformations emanate from within. For the most part recognizable from film to film, it’s as if Adams is forever divesting herself of unwanted layers. Over the course of her career, and in her most revealing work, the masks keep falling away.
She made her screen debut in Drop Dead Gorgeous (1999), and followed it with supporting roles in long-running television shows: Buffy the Vampire Slayer (2000), Smallville (2001), and The West Wing (2002). She seemed on the verge of a breakthrough as Leonardo DiCaprio’s girlfriend in Catch Me If You Can (2002), and the first time she was paired with a major director (Steven Spielberg). She lent her voice to multiple characters in King of the Hill; and was a sister to Debra Messing in The Wedding Date (2005). But it was not until Junebug (2005) that she gave the sense of having truly arrived. The role of Ashley, an unworldly and pregnant young wife, tapped into those qualities that appear genuine and integral to Adams herself: wholesome and good. But her character was also very complex, and within the film’s family dynamic—a successful brother returning to his family home with his sophisticated wife—Ashley understood, or at least intuited, more than she was letting on. Adams won a prize at Sundance, as well as outstanding reviews, and received the first of her Academy Award nominations—for Best Supporting Actress. She returned to television, with a role in The Office (2005-2006), and then took on an out-and-out and comedy, Talladega Nights (2006), with SNL alumni Adam McKay and Will Ferrell. But then with Enchanted (2007), Adams drew on her musical theatre background and embraced the challenge of a Disney live action/ animated adventure: her Disney princess, Giselle, was an unadulterated delight.
By now her range was becoming apparent and her ascension to the A-list inevitable. A supporting role in Charlie Wilson’s War (2007) paired her with Philip Seymour Hoffman for the first of three films together. Doubt (2008) saw her conflicted and on shifting moral ground as a young nun caught between Hoffman’s priest and Meryl Streep’s bitter principal, Sister Aloysius. In The Fighter (2010), her Boston-Irish barmaid was just as tough as Mark Wahlberg and the quiet centre of David O. Russell’s voluble film. She took a supporting role in On the Road (2012), and was arguably the most interesting and least explored character in The Master (2012), which saw her back with Hoffman. There, as in all her best work, Adams’s complexity clouds the outer disposition that is sunny and bright—her musical theatre optimism. It is this capacity that leads many of her directors to entrust her with the emotional centre of their films. That is certainly the case in American Hustle (2013), even in a cast with mesmerizing (Christian Bale) and firecracker talent (Jennifer Lawrence). Transparent in the best sense of the word, Adams’s vulnerability is perhaps her greatest strength.
—Mick McAloon
Running From The Reels 