NOCTURNAL ANIMALS B-
USA (117 mi) 2016
‘Scope d: Tom Ford Official
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Do you ever feel like
your life has turned into something you never intended?
—Susan Morrow (Amy Adams)
A chillingly cold neo-noir film that is about 90% production
values, and the rest relies upon some intriguing acting, but in Tom Ford films,
a man whose success came first as a fashion designer, it’s the overall setting
that matters, as that tells you what’s important. This is more of a slow descent into the murk
from the director of A SINGLE MAN (2009), using cynicism as an excuse to tell a
Macbethian ghost story that was clearly inspired by Michael Haneke’s Funny
Games (1997), where by the end, all that’s left is revenge. The overall mood of loveless detachment
leaves little to the imagination, filled with white, wealthy, and entitled
people who couldn’t be more unhappy, never looking into the mirror at the
source of their own sterile emptiness, living in glass houses with extravagant
views, leading fatalistic lives that are doomed from the start. Refusing to take a chance on Edward Sheffield
(Jake Gyllenhaal), a poor yet aspiring young writer whose sensitivity attracts
the attention of Susan Morrow (Amy Adams) as a young woman, marrying him, but
eventually leaving him as a lifestyle choice, as she prefers to be married in an
economic status that provides her the special comforts of life. Now married to a philandering husband Hutton
(Armie Hammer) who looks the part, cutting a dashing figure, but they are
little more than eye candy to one another, someone they can be seen in public
with and not be embarrassed. This
special class privilege has its limitations, as there’s absolutely no spark of
electricity between them, yet in the best tradition of a well-polished
upbringing, they remain civil and polite, uttering meaningless phrases to one
another, where he uses the pressures of work to constantly be away from home,
but this is just an excuse to be with other women, as he’s apparently not so
good at making money, though he looks the part, instead her lucrative art gallery
supports them both, even though she’s lost any interest in any of the artworks
she’s purchased, feeling no connection to any of it, calling it junk culture, where
she is literally suffocating from the meaninglessness of being surrounded by “all
junk,” yet she remains wracked by guilt at the way things ended with her first
husband when she simply walked away. So
it comes as a surprise when after a twenty year absence a manuscript arrives in
the mail with his first book, entitled Nocturnal
Animals, where curiously it's dedicated to her. At that point, the film divides in two, one a
look at her life, complete with flashbacks mixed into the present, along with a
second track that follows the violently sadistic story of the novel that seems
to have personal implications. Ford
effortlessly interchanges them, with each mirroring the other, yet despite this
artistic device, the viewer can always separate truth from fiction.
Opening with one of the strangest opening scenes on record, naked,
excessively obese women dancing on display at an art gallery, performance art
images that are both provocative and disturbing, much of it in slow motion, surrounded
by photographers and customers ogling them, where this is an uncomfortable
glimpse into the vapid culture of contemporary modern art, forcing the audience
to view the grotesque. This is the
prelude for what follows, with Ford adapting Austin Wright’s 1993 novel Tony and Susan, following upon a
flashback theme from their early romance where Susan feels she is too cynical
to be an artist, while she thinks Edward is overly naïve to be a writer, too
insecure and weak, creating a culture gap that he was willing to explore
further, thinking love is something you hold onto and don’t let go, but she ran
out on him for a wealthier guy, a decision that still haunts her. The trashy pulp novel is shockingly violent, set
in a world of pure evil and malice, with Gyllenhaal doubling as Tom, the self-loathing
husband and father who is too meek to prevent a roadside hijacking where three
men in another car drive him off the road, with psychopathic rednecks from West
Texas seizing his wife and daughter for sick fun while leaving him helplessly
abandoned in the middle of nowhere, somewhere in the vast emptiness of an
unending desert, a superbly filmed sequence, easily the highlight of the film, where
the intensity jolts her into a panic mode, as the material is emotionally
devastating. The title comes from
Susan’s habit of not sleeping, where she roams the empty premises of her
luxurious home in the Hollywood Hills overlooking the flickering lights of Los
Angeles at night, mostly alone, where she reads the novel over the course of
several nights before Edward is due to arrive in LA. Her own husband is off in New York somewhere
doing as he pleases, while she is running her gallery somewhat dazed and lost
in thought, as this fictionalized world of the novel has a grip on her that is
more viscerally real than her own ghostly, waking life existence. As if to embellish this virtual reality theme,
where it’s easy to get lost in the concept of an alternate universe, Susan is
greeted at work by one of her staffers, Sage Ross (Jena Malone), who is
obsessed with watching her newborn baby all day long on her new cellphone app,
where like Skype, she can communicate with her baby at any time, gleefully
showing this device to Susan, where it’s the latest on modernized and
mechanized motherhood, but Susan is caught in a surreal moment of her own,
where one of the faces from the lurid novel she’s reading appears instead,
causing her to drop and shatter the phone.
Not to worry, as the latest iPhone version is coming out in just a day
or two. Like a choreographed dance
routine of misdirection, interweaving an intersection of technology, fiction,
flashback, and reality where an appearance/reality theme prevails throughout
the whole film, the director accentuates all the sleek and shiny surfaces,
while revealing a ghoulishly ugly underside, themes also expressed in Terrence
Malick’s incendiary view of Hollywood culture in Knight
of Cups (2015).
Continuing with the novel’s lurid expression of wounded
masculinity, Tony makes his way up the highway and finds an isolated farmhouse
to call for help, where Detective Bobby Andes, a terrific Michael Shannon who’s
hard as nails, arrives to investigate, quickly locating the abandoned naked
bodies of his wife and daughter, shot gratuitously in a statuesque pose, each
subjected to untold horrors leaving them both raped and murdered, leaving Tony
wracked with guilt for failing to prevent it.
Tony’s character is clearly a reflection of how she perceived Edward in
the past, as she recalls the intimate details of their past romance, where her
domineering mother, the almost unrecognizable Laura Linney, warns her that
marrying Edward would be a big mistake, that “the things you love about
[Edward] now are the things you’ll hate in a few years…” Ignoring her advice, almost as an act of
childhood rebellion, she ultimately becomes exactly what she despised in her
youth, where a phone call to her husband in New York reveals what she’s
suspected all along, that he’s in the company of another woman. As she continues reading, a year goes by before
Andes contacts Tony with two suspects, one dead and one alive as a result of a
recent robbery gone wrong, with a third man getting away. Unable to identify the dead man, the one in
custody was one of the three men on the road, immediately charged as an
accomplice to murder. Finally tracking
down the third man, Ray (Aaron Taylor-Johnson), who Tony also identifies, he is
quickly released from custody due to insufficient evidence, setting up the
final sequence, where Andes acknowledges he’s dying of lung cancer, maybe has a
year left to live, but would like to get this over with before he dies, asking
if Tony is willing to go outside the law and improvise. It’s the first opportunity to alter the power
dynamic of this cat-and-mouse game, to turn it around, where up until now he’s
been sadistically toyed with by these rednecks.
Finally he has an opportunity to confront them face-to-face, where he
has a chance to exact justice by his own hands, seething with anger and the
opportunity to rectify this pervasive feeling of helplessness. Shocked by the dark content and raw emotion
of the novel, Tony’s interior wrath reveals the anguish he’s felt since Susan
walked out on him, where he’s making it plain to see in vividly graphic
terms. Among other things, the film is
about regret, having a chance to correct previous mistakes, something looming
in the back of Susan’s mind, anticipating the opportunity to see Edward
again. The way it plays out, on both
ends, in the story and in real life, is unexpected, as things don’t go exactly
as planned, where the director turns this into a kind of game or writer’s
exercise where he has the last laugh, becoming a kind of parody of life, bordering
on the insincere, exerting near imperious power to make sure Susan feels the
same kind of dark hole of helplessness as Edward, both ensnared by the vacuous
Hollywood allure where a gay artist (Michael Sheen) in a heterosexual marriage
is heard to proclaim early in the film, “Our world is a lot less painful than
the real world.”
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