Director: Tom Ford
Rated R
When the black screen marked the end to Tom Ford’s Nocturnal Animals (2016), I was left shaken, which also continued several hours later. When I read the mixed reviews, I was disappointed, since I thought it was an exceptional piece of work by Tom Ford. Tom Ford’s sophomoric work continues to explore a brooding and melancholy soul exacerbated by feelings of displacement and existential angst. This was carefully articulated through the film’s dark irony, which Hollywood is still not ready for.
Nocturnal Animals is a haunting thriller, which unfolds in a multilayered narrative that slowly reveals the core of Susan’s (Amy Adams) spiritless soul. Susan’s outward world consists of her current life—a renown, elite Los Angeles gallery owner who is married to a young, dashing struggling art connoisseur. The art world, which she has long pursued, is not what she has thought of it to be. It is vapid and banal, which often leads her to feelings of restlessness, insomnia, depression, and loneliness. In spite of the wake of her successful gallery opening, she still feels unfulfilled, as the entire event is another acerbic depiction of the pretentious art culture—repulsively chic and exploitative. When a fellow art elitist congratulates her on her success, she is disdainful of the accolade. In response, he tells her: “Susan, enjoy the absurdity of our world. It’s a lot less painful. Believe me, our world is a lot less painful than the real world.” But in actuality, her world is painful and unendurable. She resorts to popping pills at night to relieve her of insomnia. She spends most of her time alone while her husband is mostly away to pursue his dreams while carrying on with extramarital dalliances, which she later becomes well aware of. Overwhelmed by the absurdity of the bourgeois art world, she is displaced in the world she sought and created for herself. She is disdainful of her career, and she is unhappy in her current marriage.
Her life suddenly takes a different turn when her former husband (played by Jake Gyllenhaal) whom she has not spoken to in nineteen years suddenly sends her a manuscript of his latest novel and requests for her opinion. The novel consists of a chilling tale of a family traveling in an isolated road in the darkest of night and then terrorized by hoodlums. The harrowing event culminates into the abduction and subsequent rape of the daughter (Ellie Bamber) and wife (Isla Fisher). Ford paints this violence with an alarming exquisiteness. The imagery of the wife and daughter’s milky white bodies locked in an embrace as they lie dead on a crimson sofa is both tragic and visually stunning.
The novel’s theme centers on vengeance and redemption—especially from the husband’s (also played by Gyllenhaal) point of view. The fictional husband laments about his own inadequacies as a protector of his family who was too weak to fend off the attackers. Consequently, he is left to seek justice and retribution. However, they are not carried out in the traditional sense where the law is able to persecute the offenders. In the novel, justice falls literally in the hands of the husband in a desperate “eye-for-an-eye” manner that ends tragically. Although he was able to fatally shoot his wife and daughter’s killer and rapist, he was too weak to withstand his own physical injuries inflicted by his perpetrator, which eventually caused him to fall on his own gun, which led to his ultimate demise. Thus, the strength he gains to achieve both vengeance and justice is bittersweet.
The novel’s thematic subtext creates a story within a story—where her former husband’s fiction leads to Susan’s story about herself, that is, the truth about her self-indulgence and her cruelty towards her former husband as she pursues her dream in the art world. Much like the fictional husband’s failure to protect his family, Susan reflects on how her former husband’s struggles as a writer-artist became the ultimate failure and weakness in her eyes. During their tumultuous marriage, she did not hesitate emasculating him by calling him weak and then subsequently committing adultery.
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But after reading her former husband’s manuscript, which is befittingly dedicated to her, she unexpectedly gains insight about her current life and her past life through his art. Ironically, she is moved by the novel and calls it beautiful in spite of the novel’s brutality and tragedy. Perhaps there is beauty recognizing painful truths. As her former husband’s latest novel stirs her curiosity, she is prompted to reach out to him once more—but what Susan does not understand is that it is too late. No one (not even Susan’s former husband) wants to connect with someone who is spiritually depraved. Her former husband’s novel becomes the ultimate revenge because it echoes what he told her before she left him: “When you love someone you have to be careful with it, you might never get it again.” Haunted by her former husband’s art her loneliness and coldness become more apparent. And like a solitary nocturnal animal, she will forever be left in the darkness, shuddering and suffering from a lingering chill that stems from her heart.
January 10, 2017