It’s hard to remember a time when Amy Adams wasn’t a prominent part of the American movie landscape. She’s delivered countless acclaimed performances in films ranging from The Master to Arrival to Her. Her roles don’t tend to rely on drastic transformations or elaborate accents. She uses seemingly small details like the tilt of her head or a slight change in her tone of voice to create unique characters that feel real thanks to her naturalistic approach.
With her latest film, the mystery thriller The Woman in the Window, landing on Netflix this weekend, it’s staggering to look back at the impressive body of work she has cultivated. However, if any single performance exemplifies the qualities that make Amy Adams a great performer, it’s the lead role in a movie that’s guaranteed to put a song in your heart and a skip in your step every time you watch it. I’m talking of course about Princess Giselle in Enchanted.
That may sound strange, considering that Enchanted is a PG-rated Disney musical aimed at children. But this isn’t just an average film from the Mouse House. For one thing, it’s the movie that provided Adams with her big break as a mainstream leading lady. For another, Enchanted really crystallizes the traits that have made Adams such a captivating performer in the years since its release. In her engrossing work as Giselle, Adams is providing a thesis statement for her gifts as an actor.
The plot of Enchanted follows the animated Princess Giselle on the day of her wedding, when the evil Queen Narissa (Susan Sarandon) shoves her into a portal. The portal transports her into the real world, smack dab in the middle of New York City. From here, Giselle has to come to terms with a world that doesn’t have much in the way of happy endings or talking animals. She meets a hunky jaded lawyer named Robert Phillip (Patrick Dempsey), who does his best to help her out but has no time for fairy tales.
Giselle’s journey is one that could’ve gone in a whole slew of different directions, as evidenced from the various incarnations Enchanted went through in its lengthy production time. In the hands of Adams, the film eventually goes in a hopeful direction that suggests that maybe the real-world could stand to have a little more compassion and spontaneously joyful singing in it.
Getting to that endpoint involves several sequences that play upon the standard hallmarks of Disney movies while gently subverting them, like having Giselle use her singing powers to call upon animals to clean up a New York apartment only to find herself working exclusively with cockroaches and pigeons. (Not that she notices anything wrong with that.) Everything from Drawn Together to Shrek has tried its hand at these kinds of postmodern Disney Princess pastiches. However, many of these pop culture properties have a mean-spirited streak in tackling cliches associated with these characters. Enchanted never goes this route, with Giselle never losing her genuine kindness and earnestness even while folding laundry with actual vermin.
It’s Adams’ sincerity and commitment to the performance that makes this possible. She never stops to wink at the camera or make an ironic observation. Adams delivers something you can immerse yourself in, even when it’s a kid-friendly musical. From the very moment Adams pops out of a New York City manhole in an extravagant blue dress tailor-made for a debutante ball in the Magic Kingdom, she makes you believe you’re watching a wide-eyed cartoon character stumbling into the real world for the first time. In portraying Giselle, Adams beautifully captures the hallmarks of Disney Princess characters, right down to her soft hand waves and the sing-songy pitch of her voice. But this is no mere imitation. Thanks to her sense of commitment to this character, Adams conveys a sense of affection for Giselle that’s as palpable as it is infectious.
As filmmakers like Mel Brooks have shown, you need a certain level of fondness for what you’re lampooning if you want to make an effective spoof. So it is with Adams, whose trademark commitment simultaneously channels Disney Princesses of the past while creating an entirely new character for audiences to enjoy. Disney Princess spoofs are a dime a dozen, but Adams lends a sense of dedication to the part that makes Giselle feel like an authentic Disney character.
Even later works with less explicit parallels to the character of Giselle clearly show glimmers of Adams’s work in Enchanted. Her roles in films like Arrival make use of the effortless conviction Adams lent to the quintessential Disney princess. Just as it’s impossible not to get wrapped up in Adams unabashedly belting out a showtune in Central Park in Enchanted, so too is it captivating to watch Adams navigate communicating with nonverbal extraterrestrials in Arrival. In both cases, Adams is so dedicated to the performance that she makes the extraordinary something you don’t question. It’s a quality that goes hand-in-hand with her fearlessness as a performer. She’d later utilize that fearlessness in works like Sharp Objects to unflinchingly tackle the long-term effects of trauma. However, this quality was already apparent in Enchanted in scenes that require Giselle to do broad and potentially embarrassing things like mingling with the fish in a waiting room aquarium. It’s all about making yourself vulnerable so the emotions don’t seem artificial, whether you’re a grim small-town reporter reliving a horrible experience or a chipper princess chatting with a fish tank.
But the most essential aspect of Adams’ abilities showcased in Enchanted is her gift for capturing the experience of being an outsider. Far too often the role of an “outsider woman” in a mainstream Hollywood production is a shallow archetype that begins and ends with the sentence “I’m not like other girls!” But Adams’s performances reflect many varied and equally complicated experiences of being a person who has trouble connecting with the people around her. Just look at her character Sister James in Doubt. Like Giselle, James is another figure with “sunshine in her heart” stuck against a bleak world rooted in a recognizable reality. Adams’ experience in playing a character who was very much at odds with the world in Enchanted certainly helped to inform her excellent work in Doubt. She’s also flexed this muscle to authentically portray a woman who’s determined, even when everyone else says otherwise, to try and communicate with extra-terrestrials. A bartender who contends with a boxer’s unaccepting family. The wife of a cult leader. A tormented reporter returning to her small suffocating Southern town. The characters Adams plays are rarely “normal” or “perfect,” but that’s what makes them so fascinating.
Even though Princess Giselle is the ultimate outsider, Adams also manages to make the character feel grounded and real. Giselle’s misunderstanding of social cues is shown as relatable rather than mocking. We’re supposed to see our own past experiences of missing the obvious in Giselle’s foibles, rather than simply pointing and laughing at her. Meanwhile, the “How Does She Know” musical number lends a voice to that hopeless romantic inside all of us. Adams does not merely lean on Disney tropes to define her performance. Her Giselle taps into distinctly human experiences and emotions that make you remember why fairy tales are so appealing in the first place.
Throughout her career, Adams has earned much acclaim and success, nabbing six Academy Award nominations and working with groundbreaking filmmakers like Denis Villeneuve and Spike Jonze. But the traits that make her such a unique top-caliber artist were all apparent from the get-go in her inaugural lead role in Enchanted. With Princess Giselle, Adams deftly threaded the needle between channeling Disney’s past while creating a fresh new character for audiences to adore.
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