Tom Ford’s ‘Nocturnal Animals’ a beautiful mess
I’ve now seen Tom Ford’s “Nocturnal Animals” twice, and I’m still not entirely sure what I think of it. I do know that, even on Round 2, I was never bored.
Shinier and more heavy-handed than the writer/director’s beautifully subtle 2009 debut, “A Single Man,” “Nocturnal Animals” feels like a very modern, very languid and very strange film noir.
It has moments of shocking violence and near-unbearable menace, and moments in which we simply stare into the expressive ocean of Amy Adams’ eyes. At times, it makes its audience deeply uncomfortable (such as a very naked opening sequence that seems, awkwardly, to be commenting on the excesses of modern art and on the movie’s own obsession with surfaces).
At times, its saturated colors and melancholy light are as beautiful as an Edward Hopper painting.
Adams plays the central character Susan, an unhappy Los Angeles gallery owner with a cheating husband (Armie Hammer) and a bitter ex (Jake Gyllenhaal) who one day sends her a manuscript of his new novel.
As Susan reads the novel, it becomes a movie-within-the-movie, in which a family (Gyllenhaal plays the father) is terrorized by a group of men they encounter while driving a deserted Texas highway late at night—and Susan, mesmerized and horrified, becomes drawn back into her own past.
None of this adds up to very much dramatically, but it’s uncanny how Adams can make us care about this generally unlikable, shallow character, and how Michael Shannon (brilliantly playing a detective in the novel/movie) completely defines his character with his laconic delivery of the line, “I look into things around here.”
The music—a shimmering, old-school score by Abel Korzeniowski—wraps around you like perfume, and you find yourself weirdly compelled by the ice melting in a glass of scotch at a table where someone isn’t there.
“Nocturnal Animals” is, I think, a beautiful mess, but I might have to watch it again to be sure.
‘NOCTURNAL ANIMALS’ 3 out of 4 stars. Cast: Amy Adams, Jake Gyllenhaal, Michael Shannon, Aaron TaylorJohnson, Isla Fisher, Armie Hammer, Laura Linney. Written and directed by Tom Ford, based on the novel “Tony and Susan” by Austin Wright. 117 minutes. Rated R for violence, menace, graphic nudity and language.