REVIEW: Nocturnal Animals

Whilst visually stunning, Tom Ford’s new venture lacks substance

nocturnl

By Joe Holyoake

Why is it only ever artists that are described as tortured? You never get tortured roofers, or tortured accountants. Often, the stereotype doesn’t even hold true. Most artists are just as grounded as the rest of us, working normal hours and paying their Council Tax on time.

Anyway, Tom Ford’s new film Nocturnal Animals tells the story of one such character: Susan, an art gallery owner and teeming over with internal strife. She’s got an ailing relationship with her jet-setting second husband, coolly played by the svelte Arnie Hammer, and a general ambivalence for the art she puts on in her gallery. She is forced to confront her past again when her first husband sends her the manuscript of his novel, entitled ‘Nocturnal Animals’, a brutally violent story that acts as a fictionalisation of their troubled relationship. As she sits down to read it, the film starts to switch between the re-enactment of the novel and flashbacks of the real-life relationship.

As you can imagine, the film is gorgeously shot, filled with expansive shots of Middle America and a sullen string-laden soundtrack. There was a certain poignancy to seeing it the day after Trump was elected, with the barren landscapes and violent characters capturing the vast unknowingness of America, which had caught everyone off-guard the evening before. As well as this, the opening sequence is perhaps the most captivating start to a film this year, with three minutes of naked morbidly obese women waving patriotic paraphernalia in slow-motion. It’s a bizarre and hypnotic start.

Ford has also managed to attract a stellar cast. Amy Adams is one of those actors who’s had a career of being given actresses’ roles, but her portrayal of Susan, and hopefully her upcoming headlining of sci-fi flick Arrival, let her shine. She’s graduated from the Julianne Moore School of repressed anguish and fretted her way to a First. There are few actors able to silently read a novel as well as her. Jake Gyllenhaal also appears as Susan’s former husband in both real-life and the book, and is magnetic as he slowly descends into irreconcilableness.

However, despite the exemplary cast and cinematography, the actual proceedings leave a lot to be desired. It’s always going to be slightly difficult to get the audience to sympathise with a wealthy artist laden with ennui, ‘the woman with everything’ as Susan readily admits, and Nocturnal Animals never really manages to achieve it. This is especially so when unavoidable comparisons are made to Ford’s debut ‘A Single Man’, which was a sultry, emotional sucker punch to the gut.

Part of the problem lies with spending far too much time concentrating on the re-enactment of the novel, which is a fairly middling thriller and quest for justice. It wouldn’t be deserving of the screen-time if it were a film in and of itself, and consequently, it drags time away from the more fulfilling interactions between Susan and her husbands. This leads to far too much real-life plot being packed into a short time, including a comically soap-opera moment in a parked car in which two major reveals happen in under a minute. Oh, and was it raining? I hadn’t noticed.

Style-over-substance is a slightly glib conclusion, but the stylistic elements certainly do save this film from being a tediously grandiose slog. There are some tense moments, but the overall imbalance between the parallel stories ends up tarnishing both strands, with the allusions made in the manuscript ending up over-laboured and under-written. In the end, Nocturnal Animals is much like one of the fashion quarterlies in which Ford’s work is normally found in: easy on the eye, sure, but slightly overlong and deceivingly low on worthy content.

Nocturnal Animals is out now. 

 

Advertisement

LEAVE A REPLY

Please enter your comment!
Please enter your name here