Nocturnal Animals (2016)

Nocturnal Animals (2016)

IMDB Rating 7.7/10

A wealthy art gallery owner is haunted by her ex-husband's novel, a violent thriller she interprets as a symbolic revenge tale.

Director: Tom Ford

Writers: Tom Ford (screenplay), Austin Wright (novel)

Stars: Amy Adams, Jake Gyllenhaal, Michael Shannon

R | 1h 56min | Drama, Thriller

IMDB link Here

 Tom Ford’s Nocturnal Animals is Flawless and that’s the problem

Tom Ford has sent his second SOS from within the citadel of fashion. From whom or what does he need rescuing? Perhaps the thing that’s most detrimental to Ford’s health as an artist, as well as the thing that gets him out of bed in the morning: his perfectionism. There was barely a frame of his first film, A Single Man (2009), starring Colin Firth as a gay English professor mourning his dead lover, that didn’t feel embalmed in its own amber-tinted beauty. The film ached, but its emotions felt like photo ops—everything just so. Exiting the cinema, you wanted to shout, splash puddles, paint with mud, anything except examine the flawless crease in Firth’s pants for signs of the mussed soul within.

In Nocturnal Animals, Ford has had the good sense to flush his own fusspot aestheticism out into the open. The film, which plays like a stylish piece of self-torment, stars Amy Adams as Susan, a sleek, successful owner of a Los Angeles gallery whose huge glass-and-steel apartment looks untouched by human hands and whose marriage to a handsome broker (Armie Hammer) is scarcely any warmer. Susan’s most recent installation—which her husband doesn't bother to attend—features a video series of a group of garishly made-up, overweight majorettes who cavort like Lynchian whores, in pointed rebuke to the glassy perfection of Susan’s world. There, Ford seems to say. Put them on the cover of Vogue.

 Like many compulsive stylists, he doesn’t trust the meaning of his movie to spring up of its own accord or in defiance of his own meticulous plan for it. You notice it most with the performances he gets. Adams was the best thing in David O. Russell’s American Hustle, all fake fur and disco moves, but here she retreats behind enameled poise, glassy-eyed in her pain; not even a scene in which she scrapes her face of its makeup—that old standby for psychological vérité—sets her free. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a chillier date scene than the one she shares with Gyllenhaal. Only Michael Shannon truly flourishes, as a laconic Texan lawmaker who turns the other way while Gyllenhaal, in the boxed fictional narrative, follows his bloodlust. “I look into things around here,” he says, his delivery so deadpan it seems to have slipped the noose of the drama entirely and headed South into Coenland.

Of these three characters, Ford might be more like Susan than he’d care to admit: The guilty success story who chose worldly ascent over youthful bohemianism, now wondering if there is any chance of redemption. The first hour of Nocturnal Animals throbs with sick power, but the second turns limp with self-indictment, as it slowly becomes clear there’s no reason for Edward to have sent Susan the manuscript other than vengeance. Thematically, this thins out the plot. As he circles back to her for a final possible confrontation, the film, which began with a vision of a truly terrifying road at night, ends up just another guilt trip.

 Read full review at News week

Movie Rating ★★★★★

Tom Ford returns with wildly gripping revenge tale  

There’s a double-shot of horror and Nabokovian despair in this outrageously gripping and absorbing meta mystery-thriller from director Tom Ford, adapted by him from the 1993 novel Tony and Susan by Austin Wright. It’s a movie with a double-stranded narrative – a story about a fictional story which runs alongside – and it pulls off the considerable trick of making you care about both equally, something I think The French Lieutenant’s Woman never truly managed. Clive James once wrote that talk about “levels of reality” never properly acknowledges that one of these levels is really real. That probably holds true. But in Nocturnal Animals, these levels are equally powerful, and have an intriguingly queasy and potent interrelation.

It is about the revenge of the past on the present and the present on the past. The older person avenges the slights and reversals of struggling youth by getting rich and successful. The younger person, reaching out maliciously from the past, mocks this bland victory by with memories of the idealism you have abandoned, the youthful beauty and hope you have lost and the sickening inevitability of becoming like the older generation you once despised.

There are tremendous flashbacks, triggered incongruously by the grisly crime-genre shocks, which carry Susan back to the decisions she made and unmade in her youth. And there is a glorious scene with Susan and her reactionary, Martini-sipping mamma, wonderfully played by Laura Linney.

As I say: some of the scenes in the LA art world are a bit broad. But this is a terrifically absorbing thriller with that vodka-kick of pure malice.

 Read full review at The Guardian

Movie Rating ★★★★☆

   

Tom Ford’s second film is tense and stylish — and the clothes are divine

The grand designer Tom Ford has even grander designs on the cinema nowadays. While A Single Man, his debut of 2009 with Colin Firth, achieved cool aesthetic perfection, the fashion supremo-turned-director’s second movie, Nocturnal Animals, is a psychological thriller that drives deep into violent redneck territory. I gave it three stars when I first saw it in the flurry of Venice Film Festival, but a second viewing left me so impressed with the cheeky virtuosity of Ford’s vision, and the stylishness of Seamus McGarvey’s cinematography, that I upped it to four.

Ford’s film is really about the revenge of the true artist on the greedy charlatan, and the revenge of a spurned husband on his former wife.

Ford proves to be a hot-shot noir director, as two cars of rednecks box in the Mercedes and ram it off the road in the dark deserted scrub. There’s a tense stand-off and panic seizes the family as their smug middle-class comfort is breached by a bunch of unpredictable thugs, led by a mercurial Aaron Taylor-Johnson. It reminded me of that moment in Bonfire of the Vanities when Sherman McCoy enters the “war zone” of the South Bronx. The thugs play funny games, back and forth, and the themes of destruction and betrayal are thudding metaphors for Tony and Susan’s own past battles. (The film itself is based on Tony and Susan, the novel of 1993 by Austin Wright.)

An additional joy in the Texas scenes is the arrival of Michael Shannon as an investigating sheriff. He has a rabid-rat look to him, coughs like a blocked drain and has a can-do attitude when it comes to intimidating criminals.

There’s homage to David Lynch in this section, including a stylishly sleazy shot of two redheads naked and entwined on a red velvet sofa, and if Ford can show a man naked, even while sitting on a lavatory outdoors, he will. When Gyllenhaal scrunches his body up in agony in a motel bathroom, Ford makes him look like a copy of Rodin’s The Thinker, and Taylor-Johnson gets equal topless play. All this homoeroticism is most entertaining, as is Laura Linney’s Dynasty-style performance as Susan’s megabitch of a mother, but at my screening it often had viewers in stitches when they should have been spellbound.

The film gets a little lost on the Texas backroads, too, but the LA details are waspishly entertaining: the picture of a bare bum above Susan’s desk, the gallery assistant who had her baby’s cot live on a phone app, and the appearance of Michael Sheen in a lilac jacket as his wife says, “Having a gay husband is not such a bad thing . . . friendship lasts longer than lust.” Those spotting Tom Ford products will have a field day. Me, I’m just so coveting Susan’s tortoiseshell reading glasses.

At one point the movie flashes back to the moment when Susan and Edward fell in love, and the mistakes they made along the way. In the end this crazy, camp, clever confection reveals itself to be about the sliding doors when a relationship goes in one direction, not another, and the losses suffered long afterwards.

Read full review at The Times

Tom Ford’s Nocturnal Animals Looks Great. But What Is It Saying?

In the end, Nocturnal Animals barely feels like a film made by a human being.

Tom Ford, a filmmaker who first made his name as a fashion designer, hasn’t come out with a film since the 2009 A Single Man. When you see his new one, Nocturnal Animals, you may understand why. Ford is still, if nothing else, a meticulous arranger of images. As with A Single Man, nearly every frame of Nocturnal Animals has the microcalibrated look of a fashion shoot that took weeks to plan: A drab curtain brushes a grimy windowsill just so, while an active fly or two buzzes in the foreground. A pair of corpses lie artfully entwined on a blood-red couch that’s been dumped as trash (though it’s still a really nice couch), a fantasy death tableau. A sequence showing a distraught Jake Gyllenhaal trying to unwind in a Texas motel bathtub dissolves elegantly into one of a depressed Amy Adams lounging in a much fancier Los Angeles one.

As shot by the gifted cinematographer Seamus McGarvey, Nocturnal Animals is beautiful—or at least arresting—every minute, and it sure isn’t boring. (Ford adapted the screenplay from Austin Wright’s 1993 novel Tony and Susan.) But it’s unclear exactly what Ford is trying to say, though it’s clear he’s trying hard to say something. And that’s the most frustrating thing about this picture: There seems to be some nuance here—something that is possibly very meaningful to Ford—that just can’t break through the movie’s glassy surface.

If Nocturnal Animals succeeds as anything, it works as a glossy, stylish noir, with elements of vigilante revenge (as well as elements of Michael Shannon, who shows up as an inscrutable, drawling Texas lawman). But there are too many times when Ford’s vision leans dangerously close to self-parody. At the gallery, Susan has a conversation with one of her underlings, Jena Malone, who, being an art-gallery person, has slicked-back hair and is wearing a total-fashion-victim white blouse and leather harness getup. She shows Susan how she watches her newborn all day long via a cellphone app—she’s more entranced with the app than with the baby.

This character is obviously a cartoon, a satirical jab at the way we live now, at least when we live with money. But Ford also makes many of these fancy trappings—Susan’s gorgeously tailored coat and luxe boots, her big, fashionably minimalist glass-box house, or the curvaceous John Currin nude that hangs above her desk—look really nice, like things a person ostensibly might want to own. Does Ford hate these things or love them? How does he want us to feel about them? The signals they send in the context of the story are unclear, no matter how lovingly they’re filmed. In the end, Nocturnal Animals barely feels like a film made by a human being. You could just dub it a “stylish exercise” and call it a day. But I just can’t shake the fact that Ford somehow wants it to be more. The movie feels glazed and remote, a surface with all the identifying fingerprints polished off. What would it look like if Ford had left them on?

Read full review Time

Brutality Between the Pages and Among the Fabulous

Joan Didion wrote that “we tell ourselves stories in order to live.” Sometimes, though, we tell stories to kill, to stick a stiletto in and watch the blood drain. That’s the moral of “Nocturnal Animals,” a harsh cautionary tale about love, vengeance and the divide between life and art, that shadowy space in which real people are turned into fictional characters and old hurts made into narrative grist. Here, an unhappy girlfriend becomes a happy wife, a betrayed man becomes a victim all over again, and assorted murderers take turns bringing the pain.

In its broadest outlines, “Nocturnal Animals” is about art — its creation, reception and power

Working from his own adaptation of Austin Wright’s novel “Tony and Susan,” the director Tom Ford (“A Single Man”) handles the transitions between Susan’s story and Tony’s smoothly. (His editor is Joan Sobel.) Some of the shifts are fairly blunt, as Mr. Ford abruptly cuts back and forth between the two stories. Over time, though, as Tony’s situation becomes increasingly dire, Susan’s responses grow more emotionally fraught. Like any invested reader (or moviegoer), she begins to care about this fictional character, to worry and weep. Edward may be a fine writer, but a series of flashbacks to Susan’s life with him suggests another reason for her tears: Tony looks like Edward.

That’s how fiction works, of course — it turns readers into casting directors (and production designers), which is why fans can become irate when a screen adaptation doesn’t look like the book that played in their heads. Susan has effectively cast her former husband as the star of his brutal novel and personalized the story even further with some other choices. Tony’s wife looks like Susan; his daughter resembles her daughter (India Menuez). Other touches bind the stories even tighter, including camera angles and body positions, the crosses that Susan and Laura each wear and several flashes of bright green that connect the villain in one story to the villain in the other.

With its doubles and tricky turns, “Nocturnal Animals” resembles a hall of mirrors, one doomed to shatter. There are moments of low-key pleasure in this fun house, especially in the scenes of Susan’s world, an absurd, at times amusing cartoon filled with lavish excesses, baroque shocks (a Damien Hirst outrage) and exotic creatures (Jena Malone, Michael Sheen, Andrea Riseborough) who are as unreal as aliens or the boldfaced names in a Vogue layout. Mr. Ford seems entirely at ease in this world, which has all the life of a beautifully appointed sarcophagus and suggests that part of Susan died long ago. Edward’s novel shocks her back to life, only to destroy her.

There’s much to admire in “Nocturnal Animals,” including Mr. Ford’s ambition, but too often it feels like the work of an observant student. He’s adept at creating different realisms and textures for each story line, variations that add layers of meaning. Susan’s world, for instance, comes across as far more artificial than Tony’s does, with its cruelties, dust and blood. She looks as if she stepped out of a Pedro Almodóvar fantasia, while Tony ends up clawing through a Jim Thompson pulp novel (one featuring a great Michael Shannon). That’s a tough combination to pull off, especially without the critical distance, deep feeling and laughter that turn an ordinary melodrama into an Almodóvar.

Read full review at New york times

Movie Rating ★★✬☆☆  

Literary games fail to make the cinematic leap

Modern literary novels are risky for filmmakers to adapt, especially those explicitly concerned with the act of reading. Tony and Susan, by the late Cincinatti literature professor Austin Wright, was hardly noticed on its publication in 1993, but was reissued after Wright's death in 2003 and became a surprise success. Even more surprisingly, it's now the basis for Tom Ford's Nocturnal Animals, a glossy adaptation packed with Hollywood stars.

This prologue is initially puzzling, but in retrospect the meaning is clear: these figures embody the excess and potential chaos that Susan's ultra-controlled lifestyle aims to ward off. Looked at this way, Nocturnal Animals is a film about the return of the repressed on both personal and social levels, with Edward's novel a fantasy of sexual revenge in which violence against the privileged classes is enacted by stereotyped "white trash".

It can't be held that Ford is doing any of this unconsciously, given his choice to expand and reimagine the character of Susan's snobbish, bigoted mother (Laura Linney), who scorns both Edward and her offscreen gay son. Still, he never seems in full control of either his convoluted form or his lurid content, nor is it clear how much he and Wright are on the same page. Perhaps next time he should find a writer he can work with first hand.

 Read full review at Sydney Morning Herald

 Movie Rating  ★★★★☆

Intoxicating, provocative, delicious  

Shannon is almost self-caricaturingly (and certainly Oscar-worthily) great here: in the past he’s played roles that have demanded more from him, but none have demanded more Michael Shannon. Yet you sense Ford’s eyes are mostly on the remarkable Adams, who gives Susan a brittle resilience that feels like peak-form Nicole Kidman, but galvanises it with a crispness of expression that’s entirely her own.

In regular exquisite close-ups – often when Susan is doing nothing more than reacting to the manuscript – we watch contradictory feelings washing across her face before Adams brings them snapping to a focal point, landing on the exact essence of the moment.

There’s no question the Gyllenhaal and Shannon sections feel like "the fun bits" as you watch, but it’s the Adams framing story that gives Ford’s film its swoony grandeur – and if Adams finds herself promoted to the Kidman League here, it’s fair to say that Isla Fisher is also bumped up in turn to the Amy Adams tier, and gives an empathetic but also slyly imitative performance as Tony’s fictional wife. For anyone who hasn’t picked up on the Hitchcock parallels thus far, Abel Korzeniowski’s anxious, string-laden score is on hand to pile-drive the point home.

This is all as glintingly unsubtle as the enormous Jeff Koons balloon-dog sculpture on Susan’s front lawn, which is no doubt exactly as Ford planned it – and even the flourishes that feel a little too on-trend always come with a mediating twist. (The opening slow-motion flurry of glitter is right out of The Neon Demon, but the procession of undulating plus-size women with sparklers and pom-poms that follows – think Jenny Saville nudes at a Trump rally – definitely isn’t.)

Everything that works in Nocturnal Animals is intoxicating, provocative, delicious – and happily, so is everything that doesn’t.

 Read full review at Telegraph