Based on the 1993 novel “Tony and Susan” by
Austin Wright, Tom Ford’s Nocturnal Animals is a
gorgeous looking film that has style by the
bucketful. The images that open the film provide
an immediate sense of its flamboyant style and
also its interpretative quagmire. Obese women,
naked except for an outfit consisting of little
more than sparklers and confetti, dance in slow
motion to introduce the opening of a new video
installation by Los Angeles art gallery owner
Susan Morrow (Amy Adams). While Susan labels the
art “junk,” it soon becomes clear that without
it, her elite lifestyle, characterized by
Ford as shallow and charmless, would be in
jeopardy given that her second husband Hutton’s
(Armie Hammer) business is floundering.
The fact that their marriage is also in trouble
because of his philandering suggests that
Susan’s choice of looking good over being true
to herself did not work out too well and has
left her childless, dispirited and unable to
sleep. One day she receives a package from her
first husband Edward Sheffield (Jake Gyllenhaal)
containing his unpublished novel titled
“Nocturnal Animals,” a book that is dedicated to
Susan and bears the same title as that of a
snarky nickname he gave her many years ago. The
receipt of the book only serves to remind her of
the man she rejected nineteen years ago as being
a weak and ineffective provider, something her
mother (Laura Linney) could have told her before
she got married and in fact did.
The novel, that might be interpreted as
depicting the disconnect between the elite world
of culture and the down and dirty folks in the
hinterland becomes a film within a film. The
novel turns out to be an ultra-violent story of
revenge that occupies most of the remainder of
the movie except for flashes between the reality
of Susan’s life and the book’s narrative. In the
book, Tony Hastings (also played by Gyllenhaal),
decides to drive all night on a lonely desert
road in the Texas panhandle with his wife Laura
performed by Amy Adams lookalike Isla Fisher and
their daughter India (Elle Bamber). The dark
aspects of the story begin to emerge as their
car is forced off the road by three local good
ol’ boy stereotypes led by Ray Marcus (Aaron
Taylor-Johnson).
Terrorized by the lowlifes who alternate
kindness with brutality as do all good
psychopaths, the husband is abandoned on a
desert road while his wife and daughter meet a
grisly fate. Their bodies are discovered by the
retiring detective assigned to the case, the
cowboy-hatted Bobby Andes (Michael Shannon)
whose laid back West Texas charm reveals the
most vividly drawn character in the film. When
the thugs are located and cornered, the Texas
lawman, who is dying of lung cancer and has
nothing left to lose, abandons the oath he took
to uphold law and order and invites Tony to help
him administer instant justice, one the
macho-challenged Tony cannot refuse.
The novel, nineteen years in the making, leaves
Susan recoiling in horror as she remembers her
beginnings as an artist and the values she
turned her back on, and speculates whether
Edward may be thinking of something other than
artistic criticism. Written and directed by
Ford, a famous fashion designer whose 2009 film
A Single Man received much critical acclaim,
Nocturnal Animals gets under your skin and is
hard to shake. It’s unclear, however, what the
film is trying to say other than that it may not
be healthy to let your blood boil for twenty
years before saying something about it.
GRADE: B+
Howard Schumann
