Fashion designer, Tom Ford, first wowed us with his directorial debut of 2009 entitled A Single Man, starring Colin Firth. It was a film that visually played out with astounding and stylish precision, as though setting up an advertisement for a Vogue spread.
Here Ford does it again. Susan Morrow (Amy Adams) is an art dealer who lives in a minimalist glass house in Los Angeles. Jeff Koons sculptures adorn her lawn. But she’s tired of it all…the world of junk culture…not Koons, but the exhibition she just helmed with naked heavy-set women, uninhibited, waving pom-poms and American flags. What’s the point, really?
Susan thinks her career is dead. She misses the love that she and her chiseled GQ-page-turning husband, Hutton (Arnie Hammer) used to share. Hutton, however, cares more about the art then he cares about his marriage.
A manuscript arrives on Susan’s doorstep. It’s written by Edward (Jake Gyllenhaal) who was her first husband. They haven’t spoken in twenty years but he’s just mailed her a copy of his novel. She lived with him in his struggling writer days, so she’s not expecting much from this.
Nonetheless, and with very serious reading glasses, she sits down to take to the pages.
And off we go to a different type of life and land. It’s the Midwest. Gyllenhaal (in Susan’s mind) is the face she imagines in the male/hero characters she’s reading. In the book, he’s a husband and father to a teenage girl. They’re on a trip to Marfa, Texas when they end up on the side of a dusty road with three drunken punks. The plot doesn’t end well.
Back in LaLaLand Susan reads, winces and genuinely hurts at every page turn. And it is a page turner. As well as a movie-watching plot. As an audience we are glued in pain, too, by what we’re watching on the big screen.
This is Gyllenhaal’s film as Adam’s barely breathes let alone acts. She’s icy and cold and stuck in her unhappy existence made even more evident by the pages she’s reading, that turn out to be a reflection of life gone wrong.
At times the film’s style is reminiscent of “The Orchard Thief” which became the movie inside the movie Adaptation.
Nocturnal Animals is about our roaming all-night-long hearts. It’s intense, erotic and painfully mesmerizing. With no certainty where the plot is going or why the world’s intercut past and present, there’s a moment when we realize the film’s entire purpose…
Edward’s book was written for Susan so she might understand the pain of Edward’s past twenty years. It mirrors the depth of his loss, and the life he dreamed of having instead of the one he got stuck living.
Profound loss lives through eternity, and apparently so does the written word.
Three and a half tiaras