NOCTURNAL ANIMALS
Focus Features
Reviewed by: Harvey Karten, Shockya
Grade: B+
Director: Tom Ford
Written by: Tom Ford, adapted from Austin Wright’s 1993 novel “Tony and Susan”
Cast: Amy Adams, Jake Gyllenhaal, Michael Shannon, Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Isla Fisher, Armie Hammer, Ellie Bamber, Laura Linney
Screened at: Park Avenue, NYC, 11/1/16
Opens: November 18, 2016
During the 1988 presidential debate, when Michael Dukakis was asked by CNN’s Bernard Shaw how he would react if his wife Kitty were raped and murdered, Dukakis, a long-term enemy of the death penalty, said, “I think there are better ways of dealing with violence.” That may have cost him the election, given the mentality of the U.S. at that time. The public considered Dukakis to be soft, the kind of weakness is the key factor in Tom Ford’s “Nocturnal Animals.” How so? When Anne Sutton (Laura Linney) meets her daughter Susan Morrow (Amy Adams) for dinner, the older woman urges Susan not to marry Edward Sheffield (Jake Gyllenhaal). “He’s weak,” she declares, given that the young suitor works in a bookstore while trying to pen his first novel. In a marvelous, short appearance in the film, Linney also notes that in her mind, Edward would never earn enough money to suit her daughter. Dismissing her mother for being “bourgeois,” Susan hears that “daughters become their mothers in time,” and boy, does that turn out to be true.
“Nocturnal Animals” is Tom Ford’s return to the cinema after seven years. Ford’s previous film, “A Single Man,” would appear to be quite different in tone, given its emphasis on a closeted gay college professor trying to find meaning after the death of his partner. Yet “Noctural Animals” shows that film’s spirit of romanticism in that Susan, despite marrying and divorcing Edward, keeps his memory for the nineteen years that followed. She is now married to Hutton Morrow (Armie Hammer), living the rich life with a servant and luxury car, but she is covering up a potential bankruptcy while dishing out her anti-bourgeois politics by staging a most unusual movie opener. A number of morbidly obese women with virtually no clothes dance and wave their parts, signaling that our culture, notwithstanding its love of money, is junk.
The story, which is based on Austin Wright’s 1993 novel “Tony and Susan” (which takes place in Maine and not in West Texas), finds Susan reading the manuscript that her ex had sent to her, a revenge thriller in the style of Sam Peckinpah which is put on the screen to Hitchcockian music. Edward, who is not writing “what he knows,” has merged into the character of Tony Hastings, who is in a car with his wife Laura Hastings (Isla Fisher) and daughter India (Elle Bamber). It is nighttime and the roads are virtually empty, save for a vehicle inhabited by three goons led by Ray Marcus (Aaron Taylor-Johnson). They pull the Hastings’ car over and mock the family, playing with them, before grabbing wife and daughter into their vehicle, where the women are later found naked, raped and murdered. When the chain-smoking police detective Bobby Andes (Michael Shannon) challenges Tony to help him pursue the killers, and later suggests that Tony personally take revenge outside legal frameworks, the grief-stricken husband wonders whether he will again be too “weak” to take the needed action.
Michael Shannon (needless to say) turns out a terrific character role, clothed in a broad-brimmed Texas hat, spitting out tobacco now and then, and pushing Edward to do everything he can, especially using extra-legal means if and when the hoodlums are captured. The case against them would probably be dismissed as there is not enough hard evidence, and no corroborating witness to win over a jury.
The best feature about the film is director Ford’s shifting from the present day life of the art gallery curator, back twenty years to the time that she is insisting that Edward is not right for her (though she confesses her love for him), and especially to the acting out of the novel as Susan is reading the manuscript. Filmed in California as a stand-in for West Texas, “Nocturnal Animals” combines the chills of a psychological thriller with the passion of a doomed romance, as it moves to persuade the theater audience (when our hearts are not beating 100+ times a minute) to follow true love and downplay monetary ambitions. The loosened bond between Susan and Edward get compensated by the bond felt in the novel between the detective and Tony. There is ample suspense, elegant staging, and actors at the top of their careers.
Rated R. 116 minutes. © Harvey Karten, Member, New York Film Critics Online
Story – B+
Acting – A-
Technical – B+
Overall – B+
