Focus Features
I do hope this is the year of Amy Adams. Right now, I think her work in Arrival is award worthy, but you really never can tell.
Nocturnal Animals comes from writer/director Tom Ford, based on the 1993 novel “Tony and Susan” by Austin Wright. In the movie, Amy Adams plays Susan, a museum curator in the midst of a lot of silent drama. The film starts jarringly with scenes of obese women dancing nude in pseudo-patriotic costumes. There’s a metaphor there for the pretension of coastal elites and their art exploiting Middle America, but the movie isn’t done there.
Susan is married to Hutton (Armie Hammer), a handsome businessman who’s leaving on business. The conceit comes when Susan gets a manuscript of a novel from Edward (Jake Gyllenhaal), her ex-husband whom she treated awfully. The novel is called ‘Nocturnal Animals’ and most of the movie shows this story within a story. Of course, the novel is a very obvious metaphor for how Edward felt when Susan dumped him.
In the book, a family is driving through a Texan wilderness. Tony (also Jake Gyllenhaal), his wife Laura (Isla Fisher), and their daughter are off to some artists retreat, another layer of metaphor. By this point I was okay with the metaphor, obvious as it was, because the movie is beautiful and extremely well acted. But sure, the obvious way Isla Fisher mirrors Amy Adams toed a line between cleverness and silliness.
The story within a story shows what happens to Tony as things are mirrored in Susan’s evening of reading, and then with her own reveries about her past with Edward. Tony and family are waylaid by a bunch of Texas lowlifes, headed by Ray (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) in a mincing, virulent good ol’ boy parody of a character. Tony escapes them, but his family is killed. So then we see a local detective, Bobby Andes (Michael Shannon), helping out Tony as time passes.
So there’s a revenge fantasy in there about fighting back against the loss of Susan in Edward’s real life. But the truth is, as well acted and well shot as the story within a story is, if it was a real book, it would be really trashy and borderline offensive. It relies on that sort of Middle America exploitation, and the movie buckles down on the mirrors over and over again.
Eventually I was curious where it was all going, and the final scene, which I believe was meant to be haunting and sad, instead made me roll my eyes at the pretension. The problem here is that the movie is trying to be very clever, but it doesn’t work. Perhaps that original novel, where the novel within a novel was also written, would’ve worked better, although based on my research, the story was slightly different. But ultimately I was disappointed.
As I said, the movie looks great, and the acting was far greater than the writing. Amy Adams plays Susan in various steps of emotional connection, and is always great. At times luminous, at times distant, at times aching. She’s great. Michael Shannon is the real joy of the internal story, making the rest of it far more watchable.
Jake Gyllenhaal is a talented actor, but I didn’t really like the characters he portrayed here. Neither seemed that full of anything, but I suppose that’s not his fault. So my real problem with the movie is what it’s trying to say, and how it failed to do that. An action movie that isn’t exciting or a comedy that isn’t funny would be equal failures.
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