Believe me, our world is a lot less painful than the real world.

Nocturnal Animals

(2016)

(SPOILERS) I’d heard Marmite things about Tom Ford’s sophomore effort (I’ve yet to catch his debut), but they were enough to make me mildly intrigued. Unfortunately, I ended up veering towards the “I hate” polarity. Nocturnal Animals is as immaculately shot as you’d expect from a fashion designer with a meticulously unbuttoned shirt, but its self-conscious structure – almost that of a poseur – never becomes fluid in Ford’s liberal adaptation of Austin Wright’s novel, such that even its significantly stronger aspect – the film within the film (or novel within the film) – is diminished by the dour stodge that surrounds it.

I read a comment suggesting Nocturnal Animals’ “framing” material was like The Neon Demon if it had nothing remotely interesting going on beneath its shiny surface. There’s definitely something to that. Ford has sketched a portrait of shallow, superficial super-rich dining out on their ever-so-empty artistic elitism (the picture kicks off with an exhibit of gyrating obese nude women, as if someone had dragged Peter Greenaway down the discotheque and then summarily locked him in an art gallery with a selection of variable frame rates).

Amy Adams (she’s okay; I mean she’s never not good, but she has nowt to chew on here) is Susan Morrow, the gallery owner who has eschewed any personal creative aspirations and finished it with her sensitive/weak – genuinely creative – first husband Edward Sheffield (Jake Gyllenhaal) after his failed to come to anything and she met bland superstud Hutton (Armie Hammer). But, when she receives a manuscript from Edward, dedicated to her, she discovers a tale she can’t put down, and as apparently distinctive as the characters and setting are, she recognises within a hard-hitting allegory for her own severed relationship.

It sounds like there’s a decent kernel here, but there’s nothing about Susan’s story to engage the viewer; it’s impossible to feel much empathy for her plight, her (new) hubby having an affair while her frivolous friends (Michael Sheen and Andrea Riseborough, of whom we see far too little) advise her “Believe me, our world is a lot less painful than the real world” as she opines “Do you ever feel your life has turned into something you never intended?” We’re treated – asked to endure, more like – flashbacks to her relationship with Edward that entirely fail to make either more interesting or reinforce the idea that there was something to invest in here in the first place.

So instead, the raw meat of the movie derives from Edward’s novel, Nocturnal Animals, Ford seguing back and forth from in the most indelicate manner. It’s a pretty big clue anyway that Susan reads the novel’s protagonist Tony Hastings with Edward in mind (so he’s also played by Gyllenhaal), a man who loses his wife and daughter to a trio of murderous redneck rapists on a deserted Texas road. What befalls them both is as crudely devised as any manipulative shocker – the build-up to events is horribly, expertly sustained – so Tony, tortured by his own – yes – weakness is naturally out for revenge, abetted by cancerous cop Michael Shannon, yet Ford makes this tale grimly compelling even as Aaron Taylor-Johnson appears to have studied at the foot of Straw Dogs and Deliverance for his unapologetic psychopath.

Ford is such a glacially controlled director that you almost forget to double take at some of the dialogue he attempts to get away with (as screenwriter). At a crucial moment, we discover that Susan not only left her first hubby, she had an abortion to boot, thanks to her leaving the clinic and delivering the line “I just don’t think I’m ever going to be able to look at Edward again after what I did to his child” to a consoling Hutton. Guess who’s standing in front of their rain-lashed car looking entirely bereft, right on cue? Just who’s writing the pulp novel here? Certainly, Sheffield is, with lines like “It’s fun to kill people”.

At other points, Susan is beset by dark visions of her haunting read, as Taylor-Johnson somewhat daftly leaps into frame on a colleague’s baby monitor app as if Ford’s decided to go all out for cheap jump-scare tactics. I was going to suggest he’s trying for a Polanski vibe with her unravelling psyche, but he doesn’t come close. He’s probably also angling for a Hitchcock flavour, certainly with Abel Korzeniowski’s sumptuous, elegant score.

Ford leaves us with Susan being stood up at a dinner date with Edward, letting the viewer surmise whether this was some elaborate revenge on his part – that he knew her emptiness would allow him to reel her in with the book – or rather that he decided he couldn’t face her. I’m not sure she should be too upset, since it probably wasn’t a great idea going looking to rekinde anything, not if Edward’s exorcising his demons through such an extreme elaboration of their experience. But if only we cared either way.

Taylor-Johnson was ladled a Golden Globe for his backwoods pains, while Shannon mustered on Oscar nomination. That latter’s certainly the most watchable part of Nocturnal Animals, enjoying a sympathetic role for a change and eschewing the over-familiar bug-eyed loon shtick. But as potent as Edward’s story is, it can only feel diminished as a tool of revenge/catharsis (complete with ending so absurdly nihilistic, only Nordberg in The Naked Gun could have outdone poor Tony). Ford isn’t so much delivering a slippery narrative conceit as a clunky one, since at least two-thirds of his devices are stillborn, and the one that isn’t is really little more than spruced-up western-noir horror.

Agree? Disagree? Mildly or vehemently? Let me know in the comments below.

Comments

He’s probably paranoid, high-strung, doesn’t like daylight. You know, has a lot of crumbs in his beard, if he has a beard.

Godzilla vs. Kong (2021) (SPOILERS) I’d like to report I had a blast with Godzilla vs. Kong . It’s lighter on its oversized, city-stomping feet than its slog of a MonsterVerse predecessor, Godzilla: King of the Monsters , and there are flashes of visual inspiration along with several engaging core ideas (which, to be fair, the series had already laid the seeds for). But this sequel still stumbles in its chief task: assembling an engaging, lively story that successfully integrates both tiny humans and towering titans.

You stink, my friend.

Mulan (2020) (SPOILERS) Let that be a lesson to Disney. It’s a fool’s errand to try and beat the Chinese at their own game, no matter how painstakingly respectful – or rather, pandering – you are. Indeed, Mulan ’s abysmal $40m box office take in the country – where it did get a proper release, so no plandemic excuses can be cited – feels like a direct rebuke; don’t try and tell us how to suck eggs. There’s an additional explanation too, of course. That Mulan sucks.

It's Dark Age, by Jupiter!

The Dig (2021) (SPOILERS) An account of the greatest archaeological find Britain would know until Professor Horner opened the barrow at Devil’s End. And should you scoff at such “ fiction ”, that’s nothing on this adaptation of John Preston’s 2007 novel concerning the Sutton Hoo excavations of the late 1930s. The Dig , as is the onus of any compelling fictional account, takes liberties with the source material, but the erring from the straight and narrow in this case is less an issue than the shift in focus from characters and elements successfully established during the first hour.

Roswell was a smokescreen, we've had a half a dozen better salvage operations.

The X-Files 1.24: The Erlenmeyer Flask The Erlenmeyer Flask makes for a fast-paced, tense and eventful ride, but does it make any sense? That less than mattered at the time, but revisiting the mythology arc (for probably the fourth or fifth time) reveals increasingly tenuous internal coherence as the various conspiracy elements begin to pile up and the situations become ever-more convoluted. This will become the Chris Carter’s signature: don’t examine the details too closely, go with the flow. Trust Chris implicitly.

UFO IN MOSSINGHAM?

A Shaun the Sheep Movie: Farmageddon (2020) (SPOILERS) One might reasonably suggest the recourse of the ailing or desperate franchise is to resort, seemingly out of nowhere, to space aliens. Even Police Academy didn’t go that far (to Moscow, yes, but not to space). Perhaps animators think kids have no skills of discernment and will swallow any old sugar-coated crap. Perhaps they don’t, and they will. Ice Age had been enjoying absurd success until Collision Course sent Scrat spinning into the cosmos and grosses tumbled. Shaun the Sheep has been around for a quarter of a century, but this is only his second movie outing and already he’s pulling an E.T. on us. Of course, this may all be part of the grand scheme, and Nick Park is simply doing his bit to familiarise the tots in time for Project Blue Beam.

Careful how much boat you’re eating.

Onward (2020) (SPOILERS) Pixar’s Bright , or thereabouts. The interesting thing – perhaps the only interesting thing – about Onward is that it’s almost indiscernible from a DreamWorks Animation effort, where once they cocked a snook at such cheap-seats fare, seeing themselves as better class of animation house altogether. Just about everything in Onward is shamelessly derivative, from the Harry Potter /fantasy genre cash-in to the use of the standard Pixar formula whereby any scenario remotely eccentric or exotic is buried beneath the banal signifiers of modern society: because anything you can imagine must be dragged down to tangible everyday reference points or kids won’t be able to assimilate it. And then there’s the choice of lead voices, in-Disney star-slaves Chris Pratt and Tom Holland.

Our "Bullshit!" team has unearthed spectacular new evidence, which suggests, that Jack the Ripper was, in fact, the Loch Ness Monster.

Amazon Women on the Moon (1987) Cheeseburger Film Sandwich . Apparently, that’s what the French call Amazon Women on the Moon . Except that it probably sounds a little more elegant, since they’d be saying it in French (I hope so, anyway). Given the title, it should be no surprise that it is regarded as a sequel to Kentucky Fried Movie . Which, in some respects, it is. John Landis originally planned to direct the whole of Amazon Women himself, but brought in other directors due to scheduling issues. The finished film is as much of a mess as Kentucky Fried Movie , arrayed with more miss sketches than hit ones, although it’s decidedly less crude and haphazard than the earlier picture. Some have attempted to reclaim Amazon Women as a dazzling satire on TV’s takeover of our lives, but that’s stretching it. There is a fair bit of satire in there, but the filmmakers were just trying to be funny; there’s no polemic or express commentary. But even on such moderate t

By heaven, I’d thrash the life out of you… if I didn’t have to read the Nine O’Clock News.

The Green Man (1956) (SPOILERS) The Green movie from Launder and Gilliat starring Alastair Sim that isn’t Green for Danger. Which is to say, The Green Man can’t quite scale the heady heights of that decade-earlier murder mystery triumph, but neither is it any slouch. Sim is the antagonist this time – albeit a very affable, Sim-ish one – and his sometime protégée, a young George Cole, the hero. If the plot is entirely absurd, Robert Day’s movie wastes no time probing such insufficiencies, ensuring it is very funny, lively and beautifully performed.

Well, I’ll be damned. It’s the gentleman guppy.

Waterworld (1995) (SPOILERS) The production and budgetary woes of “ Kevin’s Gate ” will forever overshadow the movie’s content (and while it may have been the most expensive movie ever to that point – adjusted for inflation, it seems only Cleopatra came close – it has since turned a profit). However, should you somehow manage to avoid the distraction of those legendary problems, the real qualitative concerns are sure to come sailing over the cognitive horizon eventually; Waterworld is just so damned derivative. It’s a seafaring Mad Max. Peter Rader, who first came up with the idea in 1986, admitted as much. David Twohy, who later came aboard, also cited Mad Max 2 ; that kind of rip-off aspect – Jaws birthing Piranha – makes it unsurprising Waterworld was once under consideration by Roger Corman (he couldn’t cost it cheaply enough). Ultimately, there’s never a sufficient sense the movie has managed to become its own thing. Which is a bummer, because it’s frequently quite good fun.

Wow. Asteroids are made of farts. Okay. I got it.

Greenland (2020) (SPOILERS) Global terror porn for overpopulation adherents as Gerard Butler and his family do their darnedest to reach the safety of a bunker in the titular country in the face of an imminent comet impact. Basically, what if 2012 were played straight? These things come to test cinemas in cycles, of course. Sean Connery struggled with a duff rug and a stack of mud in Meteor , while Deep Impact plumbed for another dread comet and Armageddon an asteroid. The former, owing to the combined forces of Bruce Joel Rubin and Michael Tolkin, was a – relatively – more meditative fare. The latter was directed by Michael Bay. And then there’s Roland Emmerich, who having hoisted a big freeze on us in The Day After Tomorrow then wreaked a relatively original source of devastation in the form of 2012 ’s overheating Earth’s core. Greenland , meanwhile, is pretty much what you’d expect from the director of Angel Has Fallen .

Now In Full Color, with a Happier Ending

Search This Blog