Nocturnal Animals, film review: The nightmare of no second chances

Tom Ford brilliantly converts a complex literary thriller into pure cinema, says David Sexton
David Sexton4 November 2016

Tom Ford’s debut movie, A Single Man, 2009, based on a 1964 Christopher Isherwood novel about a fastidious English professor, the ever-nobly-suffering Colin Firth, unable to carry on after the accidental death of his partner, despite all the temptations of life, was an obviously good fit for Ford — giving full expression both to his glamorous visual aesthetic, so polished, vintage and neat, and, contrariwise, to his profound commitment to fidelity in relationships and to serious responsibilities in life.

The cult literary thriller on which Ford’s second feature, Nocturnal Animals, is based, Tony & Susan by Austin Wright, first published in 1993, is a less obvious choice, not having any gay context, nor indeed seeming very promisingly filmic, since the key action here is, well, the act of reading, cinematically even deadlier than watching people working on a laptop, if marginally more exciting than watching paint dry.

The novel is about a woman, Susan Morrow, who unexpectedly receives a typescript of a novel, Nocturnal Animals, dedicated to her, from her former husband and childhood sweetheart Edward Sheffield, whom she divorced 20 years ago, after ceasing to believe in his future or talent as a writer.

In a dual narrative, Susan reads the book over several “sittings” while her second husband is away on a business trip — an utterly gripping story of a decent man, Tony, whose happy family life turns to horror when, on a country highway at night, he and his family are casually run off the road by murderous thugs, and he is unable to protect his wife and daughter from the very worst. Gripped and twisted by this tale, composed by the man she had judged too weak to remain her husband or deserve her fidelity, she realises that she has mistaken him badly altogether and moreover, partly as a result, she has made irreparable decisions about her own course in life.

So it’s a dual narrative. A meta-narrative if you must. You get sections of the novel intercut with episodes of Susan’s life as she starts to react to it, thinking over again what her life with Edward was and could have been and what mediocrity she chose to pursue instead.

Tony & Susan had itself almost vanished into obscurity by the time Wright, a professor of English at Cincinnati, died, aged 80, in 2003. However, in 2010 an enterprising publisher here, Ravi Mirchandi, then at Atlantic, reissued it. Re-publication in the US followed. Reviewing it then, I too found it lingered in the mind in a deeply unsettling way.

Now Ford has adapted and directed the novel, bringing out the best in the cast, as well as creating clarity and beauty of imagery, brilliantly converting such intertwined literary complexity into pure cinema. Rush-reviewing the premiere at Venice in September I gave it four stars. Seeing it again, far from falling apart like many films twice viewed (Beasts of the Southern What?), it seemed even better.

Although remaining essentially true to the original Ford has both changed its settings and elevated its social context. Susan (Amy Adams, always so speaking, especially when not speaking), is a doctor’s wife and retired lecturer in Chicago in the book but here she has become a stylish senior art curator in LA, providing in her half of the story plenty of the riches, the fantastic clothes, the architectural and fashion icons, the superbly correct staff and so forth that Tom Ford evidently adores, not to mention a shocking, long pre-credits sequence of cavorting, morbidly obese, middle-aged, semi-nude women in stars and stripes regalia. That’s an art installation, it eventually emerges.

“I thought the work was incredibly strong, with all this junk culture we live in,” enthuses her lilac-blazered friend (Michael Sheen) at the party. When she tells him junk is just junk, he reminds her brightly that “no one really likes what they do” and that “our world is a lot less painful than the real world”.

Nonetheless, Susan is adrift. “I have everything, I feel ungrateful not to be happy,” she laments. Her hunky businessman husband Hutton (Armie Hammer) doesn’t come to her opening, doesn’t want to spend time with her, and, sharply dressed and impressively chauffeured, is soon heading back for another “meeting” in New York. Their only daughter has flown the coop.

Gripped and twisted: Amy Adams as Susan Morrow

Then the book arrives. Susan’s first effort at opening the package gives her a paper cut and she calls in a servant to help. Paper cuts deep. The novel is titled Nocturnal Animals. Having spent a restless night reading its opening scenes Susan tells a young gallery assistant next day that that’s what her ex used to call her: “I never sleep — my ex-husband used to call me a nocturnal animal... he was a writer and I didn’t have faith in him... I left him for the handsome and dashing Hutton. Do you ever feel your life has turned into something you never intended?” The girl, on her own upward trajectory, is merely bemused.

Ford has relocated the whole thriller section, set in the woodlands of Maine originally, into the dusty and unforgiving badlands of West Texas, saying that he needed it to be somewhere where there could be no cellphone reception (so many great plots of the past would be stumped by a single text!) but it is also the region where he grew up and he has strong feelings about its rough conceptions of gender (“as a boy growing up in Texas I was anything but what was considered classically masculine, and I suffered for it”.) This Texas section, a film in itself, is worthy of the Coen brothers at their best, its night-driving scenes reminiscent of, say, Blood Simple, while its rough injustice rivals that of No Country for Old Men.

Cold but thrilling: Tom Ford has proven himself a capable director for a second time
Merrick Morton/Focus Features

In a casting coup both the young Edward (whose relationship with Susan we see in flashback) and his fictional creation Tony (as seen in Susan’s mind) are finely played by Jake Gyllenhaal, cheekbones never sharper, so nervy as well as charming. As the leader of Tony’s attackers, Aaron Taylor-Johnson is scarily unpredictable, physically intimidating and suddenly vile — but even better is his nemesis, Michael Shannon as the stoic, laconic cowboy detective, Lieutenant Bobby Andes who, ultimately leads Tony both to revenge and self-destruction.

Ford ties the two narratives together by cutting between Susan and Tony as the story goes on, in similar basic postures, in bed, in the bath, in the shower. There are textural continuities too — a deep-red velvet plays its part in what sometimes are deliberate tableaux. But however highly worked, almost operatic, this film may be (and it is exquisitely photographed by Seamus McGarvey), that doesn’t diminish the emotional ferocity.

There’s a fantastic scene, entirely Ford created, in a restaurant between the young Susan, about to marry Edward as an act of bohemian rebellion, and her ghastly, haughty mother Anne (Laura Linney), a glittering helmet-haired gorgon, whose appearance will remind cineastes of Mommie Dearest and others of Hillary Clinton.

“Don’t do this, you’ll regret it and you’ll only hurt Edward in the end,” Anne warns, telling Susan that actually they’re very alike.

“You and I are nothing alike,” says Susan furiously.

“Really? Just wait — we all eventually turn into our mothers,” Anne retorts smoothly. She doesn’t need to add Oscar Wilde’s killer follow-through, that if this is the tragedy of women, “no man does, and that is his”.

For all the stylisation there’s no evading the emotional thrust, driven home in the scene of Susan and Edward’s break-up years ago. “Do you love me?” he asks. “That’s not the point,” she parries.

It is, though. “When you love someone you work it out, you have to be careful with it, you don’t just throw it away — you might never get it again,” he pleads. Nocturnal Animals is about never getting it again, no second chances, that nightmare.

Cert 15, 117 mins

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