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).
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.