In the would-be-thriller-but-really-squirmer Nocturnal Animals, Amy Adams plays a young woman who becomes infatuated with the romance of being with a starving artist, the sensitive Edward (Jake Gyllenhaal). After the romance wears off, she dumps him for a higher testosterone model, the striving businessman Hutton (Armie Hammer). Twenty years later, she has become a successful art dealer with all the trappings of an affluent life, buy plunges into a midlife crisis. At this moment, Edward finally gets a novel published and sends her an advance copy. Shocked to see that it is dedicated to her, she starts reading it and becomes engrosses, which is exactly what Edward has intended.
Nocturnal Animals is the braiding of three plot threads: the story of the doomed romance between the young Susan and Edward, Susan’s current melodrama with Hutton and a reenactment of the plot of Edward’s novel. The novel’s story takes up most of the screen time. It’s a garden variety, but particularly grim, revenge story, with a man (also played by Gyllenhaal) whose family is high jacked in desolate West Texas by a crew of sadistic lowlifes with the very worst intentions. If you’ve ever seen a crime movie, you know what is going to happen to the guy’s wife and daughter. After an excruciatingly long menace-and-dread segment, Gyllenhaal escapes and stumbles into the potential for revenge, guided by the local detective (Michael Shannon).
If you’ve survived the squirming caused by the unremittingly and gratuitously uncomfortable kidnapping sequence, you’re in for a treat with Michael Shannon’s performance, which is really the only reason to see Nocturnal Animals. Shannon doesn’t make any unnecessary movements, which focuses us his piercing and unblinking eyes, which make clear that he is a particularly dangerous man. And, we learn, even more dangerous because he is a man without anything to lose.
Actually, though, Laura Linney is also superb as Susan’s mom, unrecognizable underneath a formidable Dina Merill bouffant. Linney actually gets the one sure thing LOL laugh line in the movie. Aaron Taylor-Johnson is also devastatingly despicable as the most sadistic and loathsome of the thugs. Adams, Gyllenhaal and Hammer are all fine, too.
This is the second movie from director Tom Ford, the fashion designer; it’s nothing at all like the his A Single Man, with its exploration of loneliness, grief and identity repression. Ford’s background in fashion probably informs some jokiness in Susan’s world of overly precious art dealers and silly avant garde “art”. But other than that, there really isn’t any humor to leaven the unpleasantness of the Gyllenhaal story.
The reason that Susan’s dumping of Edward is supposed to be so scarring is overblown, and I’m finding it has become an all too easy screenwriting device. (We’ve come a long way since Alfie in 1966.)
I should note that I think that I do GET this movie, with its layers of revenge and its comments on art. I just don’t think that the payoff is there. Nocturnal Animals will make for a solid $3.99 video rental so you can fast forward until you see Michael Shannon on the screen.
