Review: Nocturnal Animals
Combining melodrama with the darkest of pulp noirs, Nocturnal Animals is a chilly and chilling passion play of regret and revenge, duty and desire, and how art and reality often define and destroy one's life.
To say designer turned filmmaker Tom Ford's follow-up to his elegantly melancholy debut A Single Man is ambitious is an understatement. Adapted from Austin Wright's novel Tony and Susan, Nocturnal Animals features a three-strand narrative, two of which parallel one another, one of which is a flashback, and one of which is a retribution disguised as fiction. That all three strands could solidly stand on their own and yet interlock seamlessly and effectively is a testament to Ford's abilities as both storyteller and filmmaker.
Amy Adams stars as Susan, a gallery owner and chronic insomniac who contains her sadness and guilt under a lacquer of pristinely composed vampiric chic. "I feel ungrateful not to be happy," she confides early in the film and this would seem a statement of self-awareness given her social circle's approbatory exclamations on her gallery opening and her marriage to dashing powerbroker Hutton (Armie Hammer). Yet this is a milieu that thrives on appearances rather than the reality and the reality of Susan's situation is that, for all their moneyed trappings, she and Hutton are not only going broke but their marriage is all but disintegrated. Thoughts of what her life could have been amplify when she receives a manuscript titled Nocturnal Animals from her first husband, Edward (Jake Gyllenhaal), with whom she hasn't spoken in almost 20 years. Marrying Edward against the wishes of her mother (Laura Linney), who deemed the struggling writer beneath their class, Susan eventually decided Edward was too weak and romantic for her own cynical nature.
Weak and romantic are not applicable descriptors for the manuscript that Edward has sent her. With Hutton away in New York for "business," Susan settles in to read Edward's story, a tale centering around Tony (Gyllenhaal), his wife Laura (Isla Fisher) and their daughter India (Ellie Bamber) and their harrowing encounter with a trio of West Texas rednecks led by Ray (Aaron Taylor-Johnson). This strand is easily the most unsettling not only because Taylor-Johnson is so convincingly menacing or that there's a suffocating air of inevitability to the family's fate, but because Ford stages it as an all-too-real nightmare. There is absolutely nothing Tony can do to diffuse the situation, he's cornered into making choices that he knows will worsen or escalate the trio's actions, and he's continually goaded into acknowledging his weakness, his impotence as a man not just as the events are unfolding but long after his wife and daughter are found dead and the case is being investigated by Bobby Andes, the small town detective portrayed with magnificent ambivalence by Michael Shannon.
They say the first cut is the deepest and revenge is a dish best served cold and that certainly holds true for Edward's form of payback for having his heart broken. That Susan should read the work he dedicated to her as an allegory of their marriage is no surprise as the title alone is a clear signifier (Edward had nicknamed her a "nocturnal animal" during their marriage). Fact and fiction blur into one another as Ford presents a plethora of mirror images, most pointedly in the casting of Adams' doppelgänger Fisher as the fictional version of Susan as well as the repeat of the striking shot of two nude bodies nearly intertwined. Unsurprisingly, the film is a visual delight filled with sleek and sharp compositions beautifully captured by cinematographer Seamus McGarvey and smartly edited by Joan Sobel. Abel Korzeniowski's stormy and foreboding score recalls the lush notes found in films by Alfred Hitchcock and Douglas Sirk.
Adams is as riveting as ever. Her characteristic unshowiness initially jars with Ford's sumptuous mise-en-scène, which all but demands the performance to be florid (à la Andrea Riseborough's marvelous turn as a bejeweled and caftan-wearing socialite), but her nuanced and emotionally complex performance roots the film. It's devastating to watch the ever-widening cracks in her composure as Susan realises all too late how she has misguided her own destiny; that final image of Susan is horrifying to behold.
Gyllenhaal, as superb an actor as he is, is arguably at his best when there are no tricks (losing weight, muscling up) involved. As Edward, he is endearingly vulnerable but as Tony, Gyllenhaal immerses himself in a state of genuine despair. The primal rawness of his portrayal is almost too uncomfortable to witness, so brutally does it stab at your heart and gut.
Nocturnal Animals is by no means an original movie - one can find the spirits of Sirk, Hitchock, David Lynch, Jean Cocteau, Wong Kar Wai, and Jim Thompson lurking in every frame - but it is a relentlessly gripping one that lingers long after the end credits roll.
Nocturnal Animals
Directed by: Tom Ford
Written by: Tom Ford; adapted from the novel Tony and Susan by Austin Wright
Starring: Amy Adams, Jake Gyllenhaal, Michael Shannon, Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Isla Fisher, Armie Hammer, Laura Linney, Andrea Riseborough, Michael Sheen, Ellie Bamber, Jena Malone, Karl Glusman
