How would you feel if your ex-husband, estranged for many years, mails you a manuscript named after and dedicated to you? When Susan, chic art gallery owner, receives such a gift from Edward, a spark of hunger ignites in her eyes, thus beginning the film Nocturnal Animals. As she reads the manuscript, a surprisingly violent and nihilistic tale of a man losing his family and seeking vengeance, she becomes consumed. Her consciousness slipping from her, she remembers her own love story: young lovers rebelling against the constraints of her pious family, their marriage ending in secrecy and cruelty, her current husband's infidelities. Obsessing over the story, Susan seems to be rekindling her affections for Edward, apparently as he had intended. By the end, however, all is not as it seems, and the lessons of love won and lost are far from over.
Tom Ford's second directorial turn is intoxicating, a haunting vision of the damage two lonely people can wreak in the aftermath of love. Brimming with both style and substance, the film masters its complex tonal and structural design, and most of the credit is due to Ford himself. He forces us to witness several plotlines simultaneously, including the Susan's present dilemma (reading the manuscript), her romantic history (with her family, first husband, and current husband), and the fictional tale itself (starring a man too like her ex-husband for comfort). A result of these intimately edited strands, often visually intersecting in the same image, is that we aren't always sure what we are seeing. Ford expertly fuses fiction to reality, past to present, desire to repulsion, and as Macbeth might say, "present fears are less than horrible imaginings".
Ford once again stakes his claim as a master director, with as profound an eye for visual composition and sensual engagement as for storytelling and character psychology. Though the cast here is perhaps larger than the film's intimate premise might require, each player is kept firmly in their place and allowed to steal the screentime given them. Jake Gyllenhaal and Amy Adams, as the protagonists, begin behind the veneer of innocence and sweetness often attributed to them, and as the film continues their darker sensibilities creep through like needles until the veil has been torn asunder; by the end, they reveal themselves to be the monsters of the night the title suggests.
Similarly, the secondary players revel in their own nastinesses. On one hand we have finely dressed pillars of the community -- wealthy ex-debutante mother Laura Linney, detective searching for justice in an evil world Michael Shannon -- whose motivations and destinations are at once logical and cruel. On the other, we have grotesque figures -- edgy and eccentric Michael Sheen and Andrea Riseborough, brutal villain Aaron Taylor-Johnson -- whose presence pushes our protagonists into a deeper miasma of confused purpose and inverted identity.
Complemented by some of the best cinematography this year (from genius and personal favorite Seamus McGarvey, Anna Karenina, Wit, The Hours, Atonement, We Need to Talk About Kevin) and a chilling score (from Abel Korzeniowski, A Single Man, Penny Dreadful), the film exemplifies how great a film can be when each of its considerably talented artists are encouraged to do some of their best work. It's also an example of how fabulous it is to have a film that encourages the audience to think for themselves, rather than spelling everything out along the way.
For example, the opening credits have drawn some ire, and the somewhat ambiguous ending has raised criticism as well. The former features nude dancing women, obsese and mostly older, amidst varying degrees of costume and glitter. While some have criticized this as a provocative body-shaming gimmick, and it well may be when we contrast it with the remarkably toned physiques of the other actors in the movie, it deserves more than such a simple write-off. These women might be a kind of muse, a narrator warning us of the ugliness to come, or a defiant kind of chorus relishing in their bodily freedom. When we contrast those images -- which are revealed to be installations in Susan's new art exhibit -- with Susan's preoccupation with how her life is "supposed" to look and how unhappy that makes her, we see the dangers of cultural obsession with beauty standards. The women, so joyous in their dancing and so proud to be in their own skins, critique what we expect and arguably shame us for so objectifying them.
The ending is a bit less obvious, as it is primarily character-based. After the vaguely allegorical story (we're never quite convinced that Edward's fictional tale is entirely fictional, and its emotional odyssey is certainly directly translatable to his own despair) in which Edward's life is revealed to be full of substance but devoid of beauty, we are reminded that Susan's life is stylish and luxurious but devoid of meaning or purpose. Seeing Edward as finally coming into his own, Susan reflects on pushing him to finish a book and be more assertive and aggressive and how he has finally done that. Paradoxically, the manuscript's violence has strangely transferred into her own life: in the layered misogyny of her art exhibit, her ambivalence toward her coworkers and friends, increasingly violent artwork like arrow-pierced animals and the graphic "REVENGE" plastered on the wall before she breaks a friend's phone in which she sees a frightening specter. Have I convinced you yet? Edward's disturbing gift to her awakens the desire she once had for him, and she pursues him again. So, at the end, when he stands her up in the restaurant where she sips her cocktails in tortured isolation, is he rejecting her and forcing her to experience his own grief? Or was his book his declaration of independence from her influence, allowing him to ignore her superficial presence? Or was meeting her again too painful for him, resulting in his ending in a manner similar to that of his character's ending (going blind and killing himself, even maybe accidentally)? It's up for interpretation.
IMDb: Nocturnal Animals
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