GRIPPING NOIR MELODRAMA
Nocturnal Animals
Running time: 1hr 57min Starring: Amy Adams, Jake Gyllenhaal, Michael Shannon, Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Isla Fisher, Karl Glusman, Armie Hammer, Laura Linney, Andrea Riseborough, Michael Sheen, Ellie Bamber, Jena Malone, Kristin Bauer van Straten
Director-screenwriter: Tom Ford
DAVID Lynch meets Alfred Hitchcock meets Douglas Sirk in Nocturnal Animals, a sumptuously entertaining noir melodrama laced with vicious crime and psychological suspense, which more than delivers on the promise of A Single Man, writer-director Tom Ford’s first foray behind the camera seven years ago.
Confidently dovetailing three strands that depict present and past reality, as well as a dark fictional detour that functions as a blunt real-life rebuke, the movie once again demonstrates that Ford is an intoxicating sensualist and accomplished storyteller, with as fine an eye for character detail as he has for colour and composition.
Nocturnal Animals provides Amy Adams with another multifaceted role, this time as a woman whose unhappiness is rooted in buried guilt.
Ford adapted the screenplay from late American novelist Austin Wright’s 1993 book Tony and Susan, and the film’s title comes from the novel within that novel. It also was the term that aspiring author Edward (Jake Gyllenhaal) used to describe his now-divorced wife Susan (Adams), a chronic insomniac.
While the novel is about the choices that define us and their consequences for people along the way, it also is about the intimate act of reading as access to another person’s thoughts, feelings and experience.
Ford echoes that underlying theme by making Nocturnal Animals, in subliminal ways, a movie about watching movies.
An eye-opening sequence that plays under the opening titles features hefty middleaged burlesque dancers in drum-majorette accessories but otherwise naked, dancing in front of a red curtain. Those who found A Single Man questionable in its depiction of early-1960s Los Angeles as a place entirely populated by specimens of physical perfection with 0% body fat and fabulous wardrobes, might be tempted to interpret this sequence as Ford’s FU response.
The in-your-face images are part of an art installation curated by Susan, who long ago abandoned her own artistic ambitions to move into gallery management.
While her handsome, philandering second husband Walker (Armie Hammer) has hit a rough patch in his powerbroker dealings, their professional success is reflected in the cold steel, stone and glass fortress in the hills where they live, with Los Angeles spread out below like a glittering carpet.
Adams’s innate vulnerability is nicely played off here against Susan’s sleek appearance, as smooth and painstakingly put together as the pristine surfaces of the world in which she moves.
But she’s plagued by gnawing unhappiness and unable to make the similarly well-heeled and privileged friends in whom she confides understand.
“Believe me, our world is a lot less painful than the real world,” says Carlos (Michael Sheen), the gay husband of an eccentric socialite (Andrea Riseborough), who pairs chunky statement jewellery with Liz Taylor’s old hair and caftan. (This couple’s too-brief appearance is a hoot; can someone please write them their own movie?)
Susan’s sense of isolation is compounded when she receives a manuscript from ex-husband Edward, almost 20 years after they last spoke. Its harrowing plot comes to vivid life in her head, with Tony (Gyllenhaal again), his wife Laura (Isla Fisher) and their obnoxiously entitled teenage daughter India (Ellie Bamber) heading off on vacation.
In the movie’s white-knuckle centrepiece sequence, the family is nudged off a lonely stretch of a West Texas freeway by rednecks in another vehicle, led by Ray (a chilling Aaron Taylor-Johnson).
This being a Tom Ford movie, even the white trash have gorgeous bone structure, but these guys are genuinely menacing. The ugly intensity of their scenes is palpable, as is the terror they unleash.
Back in Los Angeles, Susan is increasingly unsettled as she reads on; her own world begins to mirror that of the book in the fluid overlapping transitions of ace editor Joan Sobel’s tricky scenestructuring.
Events in the novel get even more twisted as Tony works with gnarled cowboy detective Bobby Andes (Michael Shannon) to find the perpetrators of that fateful night’s brutal crimes.
Susan, to whom the book is dedicated, sees Laura as her obvious stand-in, and interprets the fictional character’s grim fate as retribution from her ex-husband. The novel also forces her to acknowledge the growing cracks in her current marriage.
At around that point Ford then begins folding in scenes plucked from the past, back when Susan and Edward were together. She was his sharpest critic during their marriage, her discouragement sapping his drive to become a writer.
Every role has been impeccably cast and every actor makes an incisive impression in this ceaselessly gripping stunner.