It's a jungle out there.
Nocturnal Animals
Grade: B
Director: Tom Ford (A Single Man)
Screenplay: Ford from the Austin Wright novel, Tony and Susan
Cast: Amy Adams (Arrival), Michael Shannon (Midnight Special)
Rating: R
Runtime: 116 min
by John DeSando
“I'll never pause again, never stand still,
Till either death hath closed these eyes of mine
Or fortune given me measure of revenge.”
Shakespeare, King Henry VI, Part III
A little of both is in Nocturnal Animals, Tom Ford’s second feature, much more visceral and dark than his first, A Single Man. Ford runs parallel strands, one from an unpublished book being read by a character about abduction and murder and the other the film’s framing story. This film is tense, intriguing, and powerful as the two stories converge in a timeless place on the dark side of human nature.
It’s a thriller with its head on straight, not clear lines of narration but identifiable emotions drawn out by Susan’s (Amy Adams) unhappy marriage to cheating Hutton (Armie Hammer) and the other by her ex-husband Tony’s (Jake Gyllenhaal) fiction about the terrible side of revenge. Although the flashbacks to her early marriage and the wrongs she did to Tony haunt her, the story, Nocturnal Animals, which he has written, is faintly evocative of her bad decisions, one of which has bloody consequences.
The outstanding actor of this indie is Michael Shannon as the sickly Sheriff Bobby Andes, a version of the Texas Lawman Jeff Bridges played recently in Hell or High Water, only much more fragile and harried while evidencing a local color, replete with the drawl, that amuses as it scares. Shannon wears his character in elegant ambiguity, somewhere between good and evil. This updating carries more meaning because the framing story illuminates the tenuous hold we all have on happiness, be it a fiancé or a drunk or a murderer.
So, for the English majors, Nocturnal Animals will delight with its clan of characters waiting for a chance to get your attention and give caution that this is only a movie. Assuredly the fictional story is a typically good-guy-gets-his-revenge-story, like Cape Fear or Straw Dogs, to cite two classics.
“When someone loves you, you have to be careful with it!” Tony
John DeSando, a Los Angeles Press Club first-place winner for National Entertainment Journalism, hosts WCBE’s It’s Movie Time and co-hosts Cinema Classics. Contact him at JDeSando@Columbus.rr.com
