It is often said, only semi-jokingly, in Hollywood that the best supporting actress Oscar has the incorrect moniker. Best supportive actress is closer to the mark for an award frequently handed to women playing the stoic, loyal wives or partners of great and/or troubled men – often in that most Oscar-favoured of genres, the biopic.

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Jennifer Connelly won gold as Alicia Nash, long-suffering wife of paranoid schizophrenic Nobel laureate John Nash, in Ron Howard’s dully sanitised A Beautiful Mind. In a similar register, Alicia Vikander recently took the prize for playing Gerda Wegener, wife of painter and pioneering sex-change patient Lili Elbe, in The Danish Girl; her own art career, unsurprisingly, is a secondary concern in Tom Hooper’s film. The tenor of the role can vary. Rather than a noble pillar of encouragement, Marcia Gay Harden’s fiery Lee Krasner was a fiery peer and opponent to Ed Harris’s Jackson Pollock in Pollock; in the very different fictional context of My Cousin Vinny, Marisa Tomei’s gum-chewing mechanic saves her dim lawyer boyfriend’s hide by comprehensively outsmarting him.

Yet all these characters are developed only insofar as they aid the arc of a male protagonist, with nary a scene or story strand to call their own. That may seem part and parcel of a supporting actor’s function, though comparatively rare is the man who has been celebrated for playing second fiddle to his onscreen wife. Moreover, it’s a trend that occasionally spills over into the best actress race, as when Reese Witherspoon won for propping up Joaquin Phoenix’s Johnny Cash in Walk the Line, or Felicity Jones landed a nomination for the Stephen Hawking biopic The Theory of Everything; nominally recognised as leading roles, they nonetheless work in service of a more prominent male subject.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Claire Foy in First Man. Photograph: Supplied by LMK

This year sees a couple of female actors pursuing the “supportive wife” route to Oscar glory. In the controversy-dogged Golden Globe winner Green Book, Linda Cardellini’s role as sweetly saintly Italian-American homemaker to Viggo Mortensen’s uncouth chauffeur may be too thin to pass muster even by conservative Academy standards; frankly, the film is fighting enough pushback over racial matters without further attention being drawn to its iffy gender politics too. Claire Foy, playing another 1960s housewife to an emotionally unavailable protagonist, is in a better position for the Neil Armstrong biopic First Man: her Janet Armstrong brings some flinty defiance to the film’s domestic drama, as she rails against her husband’s self-oriented career and part-time parenting, but she loves him through thick and thin nonetheless.

But it is longtime Oscar bridesmaid Amy Adams who makes a stealth lunge for win by playing a less wholesome variant on the supportive wife figure, or what one might call the Lady Macbeth model: the woman who stands by her morally dubious man by getting her own hands a little dirty. Adams hasn’t plucked this characterisation from thin air. In Adam McKay’s satirical Dick Cheney biopic Vice she plays Lynne, the glibly ambitious wife of George W Bush’s insidiously powerful VP, and she and McKay are hardly the first chroniclers to suggest the outspokenly conservative Second Lady exerted her own influence on her husband’s venal politics.

Adams plays her as a ruthless, sunnily beaming gorgon behind a fixed beige helmet of soccer-mom hair; all homely, Wyoming-bred family values on the outside, though it’s her family who witness her frequent transitions into cool-blooded strategist. Early on, she icily tells her alcoholic husband just what upstanding image she expects him to project, seemingly setting the tone for his entire transformation of self and career; decades later, when her daughter Mary’s homosexuality proves a political obstacle, she advances a voter-friendly stance against gay marriage with similar practical sangfroid. Her husband, the film implies, was rather more torn.

As such, in a film that fashions itself as an anatomy of a bad guy, Lynne Cheney rather steals her husband’s thunder, emerging as the supervillain of the piece. It’s a lavishly grotesque role, and Adams attacks it with her usual precision and conviction. If the result is less startling than Vice would like it to be, it’s because Adams – whose goody-two-shoes persona endures more in the popular imagination than via her script choices – has performed this very about-face before: her Lynne Cheney is a paler echo of her role in Paul Thomas Anderson’s The Master as Peggy Dodd, the austere, controlling wife of a Philip Seymour Hoffman’s inscrutable cult leader. A shift in milieu and tone notwithstanding, the performances are such sister studies in passive-aggressive power-playing that you practically expect a repeat of The Master’s famous angry handjob scene. (McKay mercifully spares us.)

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Amy Adams in The Master. Photograph: Snap Stills / Rex Features

Such parts are routinely described as “juicy” – all the more so when they represent against-type opportunities for a performer like Adams. But they’re not especially rich or generous: Lynne Cheney may well be every bit as ghastly as the film makes out, but the film flattens her into a vicious feminine archetype, denying her any complex inner life so as to make her husband seem more conflicted by comparison. It’s a stock characterisation every bit as bland as an insipid leaning post like Connelly’s Alicia Nash, and it has ensnared actors as fine as Laura Linney in Mystic River and Bridget Fonda in A Simple Plan; a streak of villainy might make it more fun, but hardly more deep.

McKay plays into the Lady Macbeth trope so self-consciously as to write a whole scene between Lynne and Dick Cheney in iambic pentameter, but she’s too unexamined and briskly unquestioning to merit the allusion. McKay joins a long line of Hollywood screenwriters paying lip service to feminism by writing these “behind every powerful man” women, without showing much interest in what lies behind the women in question.

Over on the small screen, Robin Wright exemplified the Lady Macbeth type with fierce aplomb on Netflix’s House of Cards: her Claire Underwood ultimately emerges from her husband’s shadow to become not just president and the story’s victorious power broker, but the solo lead of the show. Yet the fact that it took an unplanned calamity – Kevin Spacey’s professional downfall – for that to happen makes her the exception that proves the rule. In 2019, screenwriters shouldn’t wait for a man to fall on his sword before giving his wife her due.