Review

Thriller in a thriller

Nocturnal Animals is beautiful, but brittle

Aaron Taylor-Johnson (left) holds Ellie Bamber, as Robert Aramayo restrains Isla Fisher in director Tom Ford’s Nocturnal Animals.
Aaron Taylor-Johnson (left) holds Ellie Bamber, as Robert Aramayo restrains Isla Fisher in director Tom Ford’s Nocturnal Animals.

You must forgive the marketers over at Focus Features for their attempt to present Tom Ford's drama as a dark action pic, the teaser ads suggesting the story revolves around poor Jake Gyllenhaal getting roughed up, losing his family, and taking revenge on the thugs who did it. For those of you excited at the prospect of a good, bloody revenge thriller, you probably want to sit back down and get a few things straight.

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As Tony Hastings (Jake Gyllenhaal) looks on, detective Bobby Andes (Michael Shannon) questions Lou (Karl Glusman), a suspect accused of raping and murdering Hastings’ wife and daughter in Nocturnal Animals.

The film is indeed many things at once -- a wrenching relationship drama, a nervy Texas crime narrative, a character study of a woman divorced from her soul and, not least, a brutal condemnation of the kind of dehumanization so celebrated among the ultra rich -- but it is most certainly not terribly satisfying in any of its manifestations. Ford has made a film of many beautiful layers, in part because not one of them is strong enough to stand on its own.

Nocturnal Animals

86 Cast: Amy Adams, Jake Gyllenhaal, Michael Shannon, Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Armie Hammer, Isla Fisher, Ellie Bamber, Michael Sheen, Laura Linney, Andrea Riseborough

Director: Tom Ford

Rating: R, for violence, menace, graphic nudity, and language

Running time: 1 hour, 56 minutes

Just in case you had any doubts about Ford's intentions, one merely has to take in the film's already infamous opening credits sequence, which involves several extremely large, mostly naked women cavorting in front of the camera in super slow motion, in a spray of colored confetti. This exhibition, it turns out, is for the newest art opening helmed by Susan Morrow (Amy Adams), an extremely wealthy, emotionally brittle woman, married to a slick lout named Hutton (Armie Hammer), who jet-sets around the country, enjoying an affair with a younger, prettier assistant. Despite the fact that the couple live in an immaculate, modernist mansion, sequestered behind ridges of shimmering stainless steel, and employ a bevy of servants to attend to them (Susan is so helpless, she asks her butler to open a package for her after it gives her a paper cut), they are going bust, a fact that she insists doesn't bother her nearly as much as it does her vain husband, but it's also clear she says a lot of things she doesn't really mean.

As it happens, the package in question contains the galley proof of a novel her long ago ex-husband, Edward (Gyllenhaal), is about to publish. He wants her to read it, he writes, because she was the inspiration for it, and he even dedicated it to her. With her husband off to New York to sleep with his mistress, she spends the weekend reading through the novel, drinking wine morosely and becoming more and more indicted by his prose.

The novel's story -- about a husband whose wife and daughter are abducted one brutal night as the family drives through west Texas on a vacation -- is where the "thriller" element pops in. Here, Gyllenhaal (as the novel's protagonist) plays Tony, a quiet, thoughtful fellow, who runs afoul of a trio of redneck goons (led by Aaron Taylor-Johnson and Karl Glusman) while driving down the dark prairie highway one evening. Toying with Tony, they take his wife and daughter (Isla Fischer and Ellie Bamber) in their car, and force him to drive his own car accompanied by the third man, out into the dusty wasteland, and deposit him out there as they take his family to an abandoned trailer some miles away.

Bewildered and beaten, Tony manages to evade them when they return for him, and eventually makes it to safety, but based on his vague description of where this took place the police are initially unable to find his family. It's only when Detective Bobby Andes (Michael Shannon, in fine form) takes the case that any progress is made. Soon, they find the bodies of his wife and daughter, beaten, raped, and bloody, but can't make any arrests for some time. After months, Andes gets back in contact with Tony, and they eventually make a pact to take justice into their own hands, by any means at their disposal. Tony, passive and fearful on the night of their abduction, is now more than willing to break any sort of ethical code in order to get revenge.

As Susan makes her way through the novel, we are also treated to flashbacks of their relationship, some 19 years ago. Raised in the same Texas town, they were friends, but from different tracks -- Susan's family, wholly unsurprisingly very wealthy. They meet again in New York, as Edward is just beginning his writing career and Susan is working on an advanced degree in art history. Against the wishes of her perfectly dreadful mother (Laura Linney), she marries Edward, but true to her mother's prediction, soon grows restless and wary of his artistic ambitions. She is used to being feted and living extremely well, and begins to realize the cost of her comfort to her soul. She dumps Edward, in the harshest way possible, and runs off with Hutton to begin her life of fabulous emptiness.

By its description, it would seem as if a great many wheels are all turning at once, and it's true that Ford's work, with its slick textures and extraordinarily precise visual panache, suggests a certain kind of depth, but, when it's broken down into its separate parts, no one thing holds together terribly well. The thriller piece is, despite strong performances and genuine discomfort in the early going, pretty overwrought; the past relationship is only outlined in sketchy jags; Susan's current life is the kind of minimalist repression gag (think of the only weak aspects of Tree of Life, with Sean Penn in similar fabulously successful misfortune), begging us to feel empathy for a woman who chose the very life she's leading. As far as social commentary goes, Ford's delight in indulging in the very dehumanization he is supposedly critiquing leaves whatever statement he wants to make severely compromised. As a piece of visual ephemera, it's a stunning achievement, as an in-depth look at the depravity of the human soul, it's truly only skin deep.

MovieStyle on 12/09/2016

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