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| “ | Valerie, darling, all great societies are built this way. You live in a dream world with your strange sculptures, and that's fine. You can have that. But it won't make the world go 'round. | „ |
| ~ Libby rationalizing committing treason while talking down to her sister-in-law. |
Elizabeth "Libby" Voze is the secondary antagonist of the 2022 comedy-mystery film Amsterdam. She is a socialite and the wife of wealthy textile heir Tom Voze who secretly aids her husband in his plan to turn the United States into a fascist dictatorship.
She is portrayed by Anya Taylor-Joy, who also portrayed Lily Reynolds in Thoroughbreds and the young Sandie in Last Night in Soho.
Early life[]
Libby is the young, beautiful wife of wealthy textile heir Tom Voze, with whom she holds a great deal of influence in the social and political elite of 1930s New York City. Beneath their glamorous image, however, she and Voze are both fanatical believers in fascism, eugenics, and white supremacy; they even have their lawn styled in the shape of a swastika, although it is invisible to the naked eye unless one looks at it from the air.
She reluctantly agrees to Tom's request that they take in his bohemian sister, Valerie, who had been a nurse in World War I. Tom hires doctors to falsely diagnose Valerie with epilepsy and "nerve disease" so he and Libby can pump her full of drugs that keep her compliant.
Libby and Tom both secretly have connections to the Nazi Party in Germany and the Republican Fascist Party in Italy, and revere those parties' leaders, Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini, respectively; it is also implied that Libby finds both dictators, and tyrants generally, sexually attractive.
They have ties to a group of wealthy industrialists and armorers, and they hatch a plan with them to overthrow President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and install a fascist dictatorship, with General Gil Dellenbeck, a decorated hero of World War I, as a puppet ruler. The Vozes and their fellow conspirators, known as the "Group of Five", hire assassin Tarim Milfax to murder Bill Meekins, Dellenbeck's friend and fellow war hero, who had tried to tell Dellenbeck, who is unaware of the plot, that he is being used.
In the film[]
When Meekins' daughter Elizabeth tells Burt Berendson and Harold Woodman, who had served under her father, that he was murdered, the Vozes send Milfax to kill her and frame Berendson and Woodman for the crime. Berendson and Woodman go looking for whoever gave Elizabeth their names, and discover that it was Valerie, Woodman's ex-wife and Berendson's close friend, whom neither has seen in 15 years. They also meet Tom and Libby, who both suggest that they talk to Dellenbeck, while secretly planning to frame them for attempting to assassinate the General, which they believe will convince the American public to support his new fascist government. They also order Milfax to kill Berendson's nurse Irma St. Clair, who has performed an autopsy on Meekins, and steal the autopsy report, which reveals that Meekins had been poisoned.
Berendson, Woodman, and Valerie follow Milfax to a forced sterilization clinic owned by the Committee of Five and meet two spies of Valerie's acquaintance who reveal that they have been investigating the Committee's plans to overthrow the government. On their advice, Berendson, Woodman, and Valerie talk to Dellenbeck, who is scheduled to give a speech, paid for by an anonymous benefactor, advocating for war veterans to remove Roosevelt from office. Upon learning that he is being used to create a fascist dictatorship, an outraged Dellenbeck agrees to help foil the plot by arranging a veterans' benefit gala to draw out the conspirators.
Tom and Libby attend the gala, during which Libby throws herself at a clearly uninterested Dellenbeck. When Dellenbeck reads his own speech revealing and denouncing the plot instead of the speech he was paid to read, Tom and Libby signal for Milfax to kill him, but Valerie and Woodman manage to save him in time. The conspirators, including Tom, are exposed and arrested, while Libby condescendingly "explains" to Valerie that she and Tom are trying to create a "great society" that is more important than Valerie's "dream world"; she and Tom also express racist disgust at Valerie's relationship with Woodman, who is Black.
In the film's epilogue, Berendson explains that the conspirators, including Tom and Libby, are arrested for treason, but use their money and social position to be released. When they try to blame Dellenbeck for the attempted coup, however, the General testifies to Congress about how they plotted to overthrow democracy, which destroys their social position and costs them their fortune.