![]() ![]() If there’s an ultimate point to the three stories, it’s a rather simple one. “Nocturnal Animals” is not a great film, in that for all its virtues of atmosphere, mood and performance, it doesn’t support a wider vision. What’s deserving of notice now is that Gyllenhaal, in recent films such as “Southpaw,” “Nightcrawler” and now “Nocturnal Animals,” has emerged as one of our best screen actors. ![]() A few years ago, the emergence of Matthew McConaughey as a serious actor was a topic of conversation. ![]() Gyllenhaal goes to extremes of emotion in not one but two roles, and by now we just take for granted that Gyllenhaal can go through emotional hell on screen without raising a flicker of doubt in the viewer’s mind. ![]() But even more impressive is the way Adams subtly shows how elements of Susan’s character remain consistent from one era to the other, a certain pessimism and a lack of courage. Adams plays Susan in her 20s and in her 40s and conveys a different turn of mind for each, a journey from baseless confidence to doubt. The mistake might have been that first marriage, and it might have been that divorce, but something isn’t right. What we sense, from very early on, is that Susan has made a mistake in her life. The movie also dips into flashbacks of Susan’s courtship and relationship with the then-aspiring novelist, who is also played by Gyllenhaal. Ford seems to have an instinct for when things are becoming too much. Often the novel’s scenes are so tense that it comes as a relief to go sharply back into the quiet of Susan in her room. Its story doesn’t spool out all at once, but in bursts, as Susan reads it in her modernist and austere palatial home. The novel makes up approximately 40 percent or perhaps as much as half of the screen action, and it’s nasty and gripping, working in all the ways that a thriller might. That Isla Fischer - who looks a lot like Amy Adams - plays the wife tells us that the woman in the novel and the real-life ex-wife are somehow related in the author’s mind. Rather it presents a tale of violent crime and revenge, in which a husband ( Jake Gyllenhaal), his wife and teenage daughter are forced off the highway by a gang of crazy thugs. It doesn’t depict a moody relationship drama. As she reads it, the story of the novel fills the screen. One day, she receives a novel in the mail, written by her first husband, a man she brutally left years before. At the center is Susan, who is having a midlife crisis, as well as the dawning realization that her relationship with her handsome younger husband (Armie Hammer) is dead and empty. Everything is beautiful, but it’s definitely not real.īased on the novel “Tony and Susan” by Austin Wright, “Nocturnal Animals” takes place in three separate times and places. Writer-director Tom Ford presents Susan and her environment through a palette of deeply saturated color, bordering on over-exposure. This is the world as seen through the eyes of Susan ( Amy Adams), a highly successful art dealer in Los Angeles, who rightly believes that the art she sells is junk. A shot of a cityscape conveys no sense of interconnection, of people being a part of something, but rather of mechanical movement, observed by a mind standing on the outside, unable to engage. There is surface beauty, but the kind of beauty that suggests frigidity and alienation. There’s a mood, a feeling about life, that pervades “Nocturnal Animals,” one that’s expressed in visual terms. (Merrick Morton/Focus Features via AP) Merrick Morton/Associated Press 11, and Tom Ford's "Nocturnal Animals," opening Dec. Facebook Twitter Email This image released by Focus features shows Amy Adams in a scene from the romantic thriller, "Nocturnal Animals." Adams stars in two complex performances this fall, in Denis Villeneuve's sci-fi "Arrival," opening Nov. ![]()
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