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The novel is dedicated to Susan.\u00a0 But why?<\/p>\nThe novel is dedicated to Susan.\u00a0 But why?<\/p>\n
Tom Ford\u2019s lush \u201cNocturnal Animals\u201d is noir and anti-noir.\u00a0 By employing the story within a story technique, Ford, who, for this film, adapted a novel entitled \u201cTony and Susan\u201d by Austin Wright, manages to give us social commentary and sophisticated situational drama with grisly crime elements.\u00a0 The competing stories awkwardly compliment one another with absurdist undertones.<\/p>\n
Susan (Amy Adams) is an art gallery owner married to Hutton (Armie Hammer).\u00a0 The marriage has hit a plateau.\u00a0 And the money is running out\u2014Hutton has fallen on hard times.\u00a0 At a dinner party, in which everyone is dressed exquisitely and drinking only the best, while surrounded by some version of the latest trend, Susan discusses her impeding economic doom with a pragmatic detachment.\u00a0 She pities her husband while contemplating life without it all, without even him.<\/p>\n
Into her life drops a package\u2014a proof for a novel titled \u201cNocturnal Animals.\u201d The book is written by her ex-husband Edward (Jake Gyllenhaal), who included an innocuous note that none-the-less sets her mind and maybe he loins a flutter.\u00a0 Hutton takes off on a business trip and Susan decides to give the tome a read.\u00a0 For the next day or so, she reads, drinks, bathes in a beautiful bathtub and dreams about what might have been.\u00a0 What would life have been like had she not cast Edward, the penniless romantic, away?\u00a0 What might have been without the hard difficult decisions that traded dreams for stability?<\/p>\n
The novel becomes that story within a story.\u00a0 Set along the arid and cracked landscape of steamy rural Texas, it\u2019s a noirish crime tale in which we get lurid sexual abuse and murder.\u00a0 Gyllenhaal pulls double duty playing the novel\u2019s protagonist, the weak and tragic Tony Hastings.\u00a0 After an unspeakable and intensely frustrating crime, Tony turns to an odd investigator named Bobby (a gaunt and affecting Michael Shannon).<\/p>\n
This boiling crime narrative is told somewhat conventionally, but there are subtle elements that beg many serious questions.\u00a0 On its own, this story wouldn\u2019t be enough to sustain a feature, however, when juxtapositioned with Susan\u2019s more mundane drama, the two complement one another nicely.\u00a0 A repeat viewing might even enable me to make a deeper comment about what meaning these two stories are trying to collaboratively convey.\u00a0 There is a lot of un-peel here.<\/p>\n
No doubt viewers may conclude that \u201cNocturnal Animals\u201d feels something like a screenplay written by Tony Letts (see \u201cKiller Joe\u201d) but directed with a tinge of misogyny by Brian DePalma.\u00a0 And that\u2019s meant as a compliment.\u00a0 Sure, the easy comparisons would be with the work of David Lynch, namely his \u201cLost Highway\u201d or his classic \u201cMulholland Dr.\u201d And if Ford, who last gave us the incredibly fine \u201cA Single Man,\u201d inherits Lynch\u2019s mantle, we are all better for it.<\/p>\n
But I suspect that Ford\u2019s trajectory as a writer\/director will be to craft his own peculiar voice.\u00a0 It will sound as good as it looks as the stories he tackles will be as ambitious as the visuals.\u00a0 \u201cNocturnal Animals\u201d is nothing less than a sumptuous immersive viewing experience showcasing a design targeted at something deeper than the thin veneer that could be scratched easily but would require more work to properly penetrate.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Tom Ford’s style mixes with subtle substance.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[19],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4274","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-reviews","no-thumb"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyfilmfix.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4274","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyfilmfix.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyfilmfix.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyfilmfix.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyfilmfix.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4274"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/dailyfilmfix.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4274\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4277,"href":"https:\/\/dailyfilmfix.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4274\/revisions\/4277"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyfilmfix.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4274"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyfilmfix.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4274"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyfilmfix.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4274"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}