Amy Adams Struggles With Life After Rehab

Amy Adams is a tangle of soft and sharp edges, of remorse and defensiveness in an emotionally raw performance as an alcoholic luminary from the modern dance world struggling to reintegrate into life with her family, friends and professional colleagues after six months in rehab. Much as they did with Vanessa Kirby’s grieving mother in Pieces of a Woman, Hungarian director Kornél Mundruczó and his screenwriter spouse Kata Wéber put their protagonist through the wringer in At the Sea. But even if part of the point is to show that healing doesn’t happen overnight, the catharsis is too vague to reward all the flailing distress.

The trauma drama — ideally multigenerational and tied to addiction, abuse or both — is a tough one for audiences that tends to work better as an acting showcase than as involving psychodrama. Despite the pleasure of seeing Adams in a role that makes use of her extensive dance background, backed by a strong supporting cast, the nagging question of “What do we get out of this?” is hard to shake.

Mundruczó, whose most memorable film remains the sharp-toothed 2014 political allegory White God, sets most of the action on Cape Cod, a tranquil place where all that water and gentle, enveloping light might be expected to have purification powers. For Adams’ Laura, its restorative properties are compromised by ever-present memories of her unhappy childhood, many of them directly associated with the family’s gorgeous summer house.

Not because it makes sense as something anybody would do right after returning home from a long stint in a recovery clinic but because the audience requires a quick background primer, Laura steps into the dance studio separate from the main house and plays a DVD recording that just happens to be handy.

It’s a tribute of sorts to the legacy of her late father, Ivan Baum (Pál Frenák), the “heart and soul” behind the legendary dance company that bears his name and an artist provocateur known for his controversial — code for “rapey” — choreography.

Laura, a dancer herself, has carried the torch for the company in the years since his death. In an interview clip, she casually reveals that both the male and female principals who originated a celebrated dance piece were sleeping with her father at the time. When the work came together, Laura recounts that “they went at each other like two scorpions,” speculating that the magnificent combative energy on stage might have been her father’s motivation for making them sexual rivals.

Jagged shards of memory shown in flashbacks suggest Laura’s fear and vulnerability as a young girl (played by the filmmakers’ daughter Eliz Mundruczó), alongside indications of narcissistic, at times violent Ivan’s shortcomings as a parent. His drinking appears to have led to Laura secretly slugging down alcohol as a child. When her close friend and Baum Company associate Peter (Dan Levy) later refers to Ivan as a “speed freak,” Laura freely acknowledges that he was “a high-functioning addict.”

Early in the film, images of an overturned car on a city street point to disclosures about the inciting event that marked Laura’s rock bottom. Her high-school senior daughter Josie (Chloe East) is terse and uncommunicative with her, angry about how much space her mother’s drama has taken up in everyone else’s life. Laura’s young son, Felix (Redding L. Munsell), at first either keeps his distance or is sullen and uneasy around her.

The reunion with her husband Martin (Murray Bartlett) is more complicated. He loves her but worries about losing her again, while she seems uncomfortable with intimacy, often coming across as cold. All of her family members seem to question her commitment to staying off her self-destructive path.

Laura reconnects with her friend Debbie (Jenny Slate), a breast cancer survivor who scored the stunning Cape Cod house in her divorce from George (Rainn Wilson). Chair of the Baum Company, George is tired of topping up the shortfall in philanthropic donations with his own money; he conveys the frustration of everyone in the organization with Laura’s long absence from her artistic directorship and refusal to name a return date.

George and others keep reminding Laura that the dance company is at risk of going under, while he’s also angling to buy her family home, capitalizing on the financial hole his friends have fallen into — partly due to the bills from Laura’s swanky rehab retreat. Martin is a painter who has put his art on hold to do gardening work for Laura’s rich friends.

So much resentment. So much pressure. So much downer drama. Adams’ natural luminosity makes you keep pulling for her, but the movie becomes one-note dour, cataloguing Laura’s damage rather than shaping it into a modulated journey that’s actually going somewhere beyond the obvious. Mundruczó is more alert to the messiness than the emergence from it.

Some scenes just don’t add much. That includes an encounter with Keegan (Brett Goldstein, wasted), a friendly Brit flying kites on the beach — kites do a lot of symbolic heavy lifting in flashbacks — to whom Laura confesses that boozing was her only way of letting go. Keegan lends a sympathetic ear to her anguished recent history and precarious recovery, sharing that he’s been clean for a year and a half from heroin addiction.

The most robust dramatic thread is the tension between Laura and Josie, who had to step in and act as a mother to Felix while she was away, in the process missing her chance of a scholarship to her chosen college. Josie is also a dancer, and when she puts herself through some physically punishing choreography in the studio, she’s trying to hurt her mother.

That scene works better than their pas de deux on the beach, which is pretty but kind of embarrassing, and a sequence of random people breaking into a tortured dance on a windy city street is an eye-roller.

It’s gratifying that Mundruczó and Wéber don’t go the formulaic route of dumping a big reveal of childhood trauma at the end, even if they do seem to be teasing that promise. Most of what we learn is right there in Laura’s opening voiceover about happy childhoods just being something we tell ourselves.

But the familiar dynamic of a daughter unseen by her egotistical artist father — see Sentimental Value for a superior example — makes At the Sea feel dramatically underwhelming, even hollow, though Adams is affecting as Laura shows her remorse for the way she let her kids see her for years

French cinematographer Yorick Le Saux gives the movie a clean, unfussy look, with the soft Cape Cod light suggesting a world faded by the sun, and the gentle melodies of Sacha and Evgueni Galperine never get intrusive with the emotional nudges. Additional music is used by Japanese composer Joe Hisaishi, known for his long collaborations with Hayao Miyazaki and Takeshi Kitano.

This is primarily a performance-driven film, which benefits from an appealing cast, even if they generally seem overqualified for their roles. At least Levy brings welcome humor. East and Munsell as Laura and Martin’s children have the most touching moments. But Adams is the chief factor that makes At the Sea watchable, if not as compelling as it should be. She brings a fractured grace to Laura that gradually evolves into what looks like peaceful acceptance.