McAdams starred in three films in 2009. State of Play, a political thriller based on a BBC television series, co-starred Russell Crowe, Helen Mirren, and Ben Affleck. McAdams played Della, an online reporter who investigates a possible conspiracy with a veteran print journalist, played by Crowe. As part of her research, McAdams visited The Washington Post’s offices and met with politicians on Capitol Hill. Entertainment Weekly felt she was “perfectly cast as an ambitious wonkette” while The Daily Telegraph noted that “McAdams, with her lively eyes and large, expressive forehead, holds her own against Crowe. Mercifully, she avoids any temptation to play girly and demure to his grizzled alpha male.” The film grossed over $87 million worldwide. McAdams’s second 2009 project was the science-fiction romance The Time Traveler’s Wife, an adaptation of Audrey Niffenegger’s bestselling novel. McAdams fell “madly in love” with the book but was initially slightly hesitant to accept the film role because Clare, the long-suffering wife, is a “character that people have already cast in their heads”. Peter Travers of Rolling Stone said, “I’d watch the vibrant Rachel McAdams and Eric Bana in anything, but The Time Traveler’s Wife is pushing it.” The Los Angeles Times found her “luminous yet, sadly, her facility as an actress is mostly wasted.” Writing in The Chicago Tribune, Michael Phillips, in an otherwise tepid review, said of her performance: “Every scene she’s in, even the silly ones, becomes better—truer, often against long odds—because she’s in it. Her work feels emotionally spontaneous yet technically precise. She has an unusually easy touch with both comedy and drama, and she never holds a melodramatic moment hostage.” The film was a commercial success, earning over $101 million worldwide. Sherlock Holmes was McAdams’s final movie of the year. She played Irene Adler, a love interest for Robert Downey, Jr.’s Sherlock, and welcomed the opportunity to play a character who is “her own boss and a real free spirit”. Variety felt her character was “not very well integrated into the rest of the story, a shortcoming the normally resourceful McAdams is unable to do much about”.
The New York Times stated, “Ms. McAdams is a perfectly charming actress and performs gamely as the third wheel of this action-bromance tricycle. But Irene feels in this movie more like a somewhat cynical commercial contrivance. She offers a little something for the ladies and also something for the lads, who, much as they may dig fights and explosions and guns and chases, also like girls.” The film was a major commercial success, earning over $524 million at the worldwide box office. McAdams at the premiere of Sherlock Holmes in 2009 2010’s Morning Glory, a comedy in which McAdams played a television producer attempting to improve the poor ratings of a morning television program, was billed as a starring vehicle for the actress. She initially felt she was unsuited to the role because “I’m not funny. So I said, ‘if you need me to be funny, you might want to look somewhere else'”. Roger Michell, the film’s director, had a number of dinners with McAdams and persuaded her to join the cast. It was her second time to work with Diane Keaton, whom she has described as a mentor figure. Kenneth Turan of the Los Angeles Times said McAdams “gives the kind of performance we go to the movies for” while Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times felt she played “as lovable a lead as anyone since Amy Adams in Junebug” in an otherwise “routine” movie. The New York Post was impressed by “her gift for physical comedy”, as was Variety. While the New York Times felt she “plays her role exceptionally well” and is “effortlessly likable”, it called on Hollywood to give her parts “worthy” of her talent.
“Ms. McAdams has to rely on her dimples to get by. She does, but she could do better.” The film was a modest commercial success, grossing $58 million worldwide from a production budget of $40 million. McAdams was disappointed that the film failed to find a larger audience, remarking that “I only hear these businesspeople: ‘Well, no one was sure who it was for.'” McAdams’ first film of 2011, Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris, opened the 2011 Cannes Film Festival and saw her reunite with Wedding Crashers’s Owen Wilson. Allen wrote the part of the shrewish Inez for McAdams, after hearing “glowing reports” from her former co-star Diane Keaton. He has said that he is “crazy about Rachel” and wanted to give her the opportunity to play something other than “beautiful girls”. The film was shot on location in Paris and McAdams has said that the experience “will always have a great place in my heart.” The Guardian bemoaned that she “has morphed from the sweet thing in Wedding Crashers to the dream-crushing bitch that, according to American comedies, women become once they ensnare their man”. Richard Corliss of Time “felt sorry for McAdams, whose usually winning presence is ground into hostile cliché”. However, the Los Angeles Times felt she “deftly handles a part that is less amiable than usual for her” and The New York Times found her “superbly speeded-up”. It has become Allen’s highest grossing picture ever in North America and was the most commercially successful independent film of 2011. With a production budget of $17 million, the film has grossed over $151 million worldwide.McAdams, along with six other members of the cast, received a Screen Actors Guild Award for Outstanding Performance by a Cast in a Motion Picture nomination. Allen won the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay and the film itself was nominated for three other Academy Awards, including Best Picture. McAdams’s second screen appearance of 2011 was a cameo role in the action-adventure sequel Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows. The lead female role was played by Noomi Rapace. Joel Silver, the film’s producer, has said that “we always intended to have a different kind of girl for each movie” in the vein of Bond girls. He found it “complicated” to persuade McAdams to return in a supporting role: “She loved being with us, but she hoped to have a bigger role.” The Wall Street Journal felt “she vanishes all too soon in this overproduced, self-enchanted sequel, and so does the spirit of bright invention that made the previous film such a pleasant surprise”. The Huffington Post remarked that she “exhibits far more personality and roguish charm in her few moments here than she did in all of the previous film. Freed from the constraints of being the de-facto love interest, McAdams relishes the chance to go full-villain.” The film has grossed over $543 million worldwide. In 2012, McAdams starred in the romantic drama The Vow. McAdams and Channing Tatum played a newlywed couple who try to rebuild their relationship after a car crash leaves the wife with no recollections of their marriage. McAdams was drawn to the “roller coaster” faced by her character and found it interesting that the story was told “through the guy’s eyes”.The New York Times stated that “the dimply and adorable Rachel McAdams” brings “enough physical charm and emotional warmth to distract from the threadbare setting and the paper-thin plot”. Newsday felt that McAdams, “exuding her usual uncanny warmth on-screen”, “is the real draw”. However, the Los Angeles Times felt she was “wasted” in the role: “She is such an appealing actress that it’s hard not to wish someone could make better use” of her. Time found the film an example of McAdams “coasting” in “unabashedly romantic” movies and asserted that “she’s a much more versatile and clever actress” than such projects would suggest. The film, financed for $30 million, was a major commercial success and became her biggest box-office hit in a leading role. It topped the US box office and has grossed over $196 million worldwide. Two films starring McAdams were in competition for the Golden Lion at the 2012 Venice International Film Festival. To the Wonder, a romantic drama written and directed by Terrence Malick, sees McAdams play a horse ranch worker in Oklahoma, believed to be based on Malick’s current wife. Her character has an affair with Ben Affleck’s character. She found Malick to be an “incredibly helpful” director; they discussed her character in detail and he took her on a tour of the local town, pointing out which house she would have grown up in and where she would have attended school. IndieWire noted that “McAdams has the least to do of the principals, but is wonderfully haunted and sad in her brief appearances”. The Telegraph felt she was “never better” but Variety described her character’s storyline as “a brief narrative digression in which Malick seems at least as interested in the horses on Jane’s ranch as he is in the woman herself”. McAdams’ second film to premiere at the film festival was Brian De Palma’s Passion. An English-language remake of 2010’s Love Crime, Passion is an erotic thriller about a power struggle between two business executives, filmed on location in Berlin. The film co-stars Noomi Rapace and Karoline Herfurth. McAdams has completed filming About Time, a romantic comedy written and directed by Richard Curtis, on location in Cornwall and London. The story follows a young lawyer, played by Domhnall Gleeson, who travels back in time and meets “the girl of his dreams”, played by McAdams. The film is scheduled for release on May 10, 2013. McAdams has also finished work on John Le Carré’s espionage thriller A Most Wanted Man, directed by Anton Corbijn and co‑starring Philip Seymour Hoffman, and Willem Dafoe and filmed on location in Hamburg, Germany. In 2013 McAdams is expected to star as the Canadian folk artist Maud Lewis in the Jean-François Pouliot-directed bio-pic Maudie.
