Tom Ford's Nocturnal Animals opens with a montage of naked, fat-rippling, extremely obese women, their bodies wrapped in the American flag as they dance to the beat. We then cut to the opening of an art exhibition featuring those naked women on platforms, curled up as live installation pieces, or as morbid glitz, an excess of grotesquerie amid the well-dressed LA crowd.
The gallery owner is Susan (Amy Adams), looking like a perpetually broken-hearted wealthy housewife in the mould of Douglas Sirk, a rich, unhappy woman who knows she made wrong choices in life and knows exactly when she made them. Later, Susan complains to her friend about how she, a high society gallerist, hates her art -- "It's junk". Susan also hates her life. She hates that she lives in a bubble full of rich fakes, but her friend, quite rightly, reminds her that the bubble isn't all that bad because it's much, much worse out there in the wild.
And it's true. Nocturnal Animals, the second feature by fashion designer/filmmaker Ford, switches back and forth inside and outside that bubble: the film alternates between a melodrama of love lost set in sleek Los Angeles and a violent thriller set in the desert of Texas. In some ways, the two parts are supposed to mirror, complement or undercut each other. I'm not sure if they really do, or if the process makes sense emotionally, because the film treads a familiar path in both the drama and noir genres. Instead what makes Nocturnal Animals so enjoyable is the intensity of style, the good taste dripping from the frame, and the confidence in its structural conceit.
Then you have Adams as Susan and Jake Gyllenhaal playing two roles in the film's dual narratives, plus Michael Shannon as an iguana, I mean as a leathery Texan sheriff, chewing every vowel like tobacco -- these are such competent performers that they rope you along, in clenched fists and in tears. The break from the main story of Susan and her depressing marriage comes when her ex-husband Edward (Gyllenhaal, in his first role) sends her a draft of his new novel. It's called Nocturnal Animals. When Susan starts reading it, the film takes us inside the book -- a film within a film. In there, a married couple Tony and Laura (Gyllenhaal, in his second role, and Isla Fisher, looking uncannily like Adams) and their teenage daughter are driving along a dark, odious highway in West Texas when a bunch of hooligans force their car off the road.
A nightmarish scene of masculine power and sexual harassment follows, and Tony, in circumstances that combine bad luck with indecision, is left stranded in the bush while the thugs take away his wife and child.
As this narrative moves forward, as the shock of violence, shame and guilt plays out against Tony in the grimy desert of Texas, the film often cuts back to the beautiful home of Susan, who's reading the book and feeling its jolts. "It's touching and violent," she describes the book to her friend. Meaning it's everything opposite of her life. The "junk culture" she sees in her gallery and her circle is a contrast to the brutal reality depicted by Edwards' novel. The irony is there of course: nothing is real, Susan's life or the lives of the people in the book. Art, literature, cinema, everything is a construct, perhaps even junk. Susan's elegant despair is matched blow-by-blow with Tony's raw grief. So maybe, just maybe, in Ford's eyes, only pain is real.
Nocturnal Animals -- the film, not the book Susan's reading -- is violent and sad, but not as sad and touching as Ford's first feature, A Single Man, in which Colin Firth plays a gay man trying to deal with the loss of his lover. In this new film Ford, a society aesthete, goes from taking a jab at the sterility of the modern art world -- the impeccably wardrobed, fashionably ironic gallerists and museum types -- to the blood and sweat and spit, as well as a wipe of turd, of Texas (his home state by the way).
A man of taste, Ford makes sure that both worlds are photogenic despite the horrible things the characters are going through. But while the film's visual sophistication and emotional sensitivity is admirable, there's a sense of generality in the two storylines: Susan's martial melancholia, her pining for the past, is melodramatic, almost banal, while Tony's misadventure in the desert is pretty much linear and follows a predictable genre route. It would be too much to call Ford's film a mere exercise in style, though it's also too much to think there's a lot more beneath what we're seeing.
Still, we are enthralled. Nocturnal Animals has a rhythm, suspense, and a genuine care for its characters. It's being tipped as one of the players in the upcoming Oscar season, and judging from what we see, surely the nomination possibility won't be limited to just the costume.
Nocturnal Animals
Starring Amy Adams, Jake Gyllenhaal, Michael Shannon. Directed by Tom Ford. Sneak preview at 8pm this weekend. Wide release on Dec 1.
