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Let's just say Jane Adams isn't going to put Jennifer Garner out of business. Kicking ass isn't really Jane Adams's thing. Actually, successfully brushing her teeth without crying isn't really Jane Adams's thing. Rather, she has become known for playing women who aren't quite equipped to deal with life's everyday setbacks.

Which is weird, because half the time she plays professionals and brainiacs. She's played a psychiatrist (in Mumford), an obstetrician (in Father of the Bride II), and a plastic surgeon (in a recurring guest role on Frasier). She's played a PBS talk-show host in You've Got Mail, a university administrator in Orange County, and feminist critic and journalist Ruth Hale in Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle. But even as she interviews a smug newspaper columnist or prepares to cram her arm up a lady's business, she's so soft-spoken and quivery that you have to wonder how she got through college. Or her MCATs. Or kindergarten.

Adams's birdlike figure -- those delicate wrists! You could snap one like a pretzel stick! -- and naïve fragility suit her perfectly for playing girl-children who are love's unfortunate playthings. She gets screwed over by not one but two grody paramours -- Jon Lovitz and Jared Harris -- in the ironically titled Happiness. On Frasier, she had the misfortune of hooking up with Niles, a man long in love with another [cough] woman -- going so far as to marry him just before he figures out what he wants in life. And in the current Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, she's unhappily married to David Cross's pugnacious pothead. In just a handful of scenes, and with barely any dialogue, she inhabits defeated bitterness so convincingly that her performance is equivalent to twenty pages of backstory: that's just how good Adams is, by now, at playing life's doormats.

For that reason, Adams is not likely to be offered any castoffs of Angelina Jolie's. Or Susan Sarandon's. Or even Kate Beckinsale's. But none of them, for all their airs, is probably planning to go up against Adams for roles like Wonder Boys's Oola or Kansas City's Nettie Bolt or "White Faced Woman #2" in the Lemony Snicket movie. Jane Adams may not play roles that entail a lot of glory or majesty, but when it comes to playing frail poppets likely to blow over in the next stiff wind, she has no peer.