#NOCTURNAL ANIMALS PLOT MOVIE#

Michael Shannon is reliably hard-bitten as the cop, but too many of the Texas scenes, with Aaron Taylor-Johnson overdoing it as the main thug, carry a nasty whiff of the ersatz-an art-house fantasy of the redneck. What everyone remembers of that movie, however, is Colin Firth on the phone, holding back a tide of grief as he learns of a lover’s death, and it must be said that nothing in the new work can top such a surge of feeling. True, it’s quite a meeting the contrast of the cloud-capped heavens above the desert and the velvet darkness of Los Angeles, rubbed by the lush harmonies of Abel Korzeniowski’s score, makes the film every inch as seductive as Ford’s début, “A Single Man” (2009). My suspicion is that there’s a lot less to “Nocturnal Animals” than meets the eye. I was half expecting Bobby Ewing, from “Dallas,” to step into the shower beside her and ask for the soap. Susan cannot imagine Edward’s new novel without casting him, beard or no beard, as the hapless hero, and there is a cogent, though not very original, case for proposing that the whole darned thing, Texas and all, is simply a bad dream that squirms in Susan’s unsleeping brain. They do? “Nocturnal Animals” certainly cleaves to that solipsistic view. “Everybody writes about themselves,” he replies. “I think you should write about something other than yourself,” she says. Flashbacks return us to a younger Susan encountering a younger Edward in a snowy Manhattan, dining with him, and then-always a tricky moment in any relationship-trying to be nice about his creative efforts. Had she picked up “Pride and Prejudice” instead, she would have found herself strangely compelled to dance the cotillion with a snooty man in breeches.īut wait, there is more weaving to come. Thus do the facts of her life interweave with fiction. Tony, for instance, the husband in the book, is also played by Jake Gyllenhaal, sometimes sporting a beard to distinguish him from Edward, and whenever Tony takes a shower or a bath Susan does the same, as if to scrub off the shock of the novel.

#NOCTURNAL ANIMALS PLOT MOVIE#

Would it be pedantic to point out that this is not how people actually read a book? The movie wants to suggest that the experience of reading is just like watching a movie-a flat-out lie, cunningly concealed by Ford as he stitches together the two parts of his story. Now and then, during the Texan trauma, we cut back to Susan, who keeps gasping or dropping the manuscript when she gets to a scary bit. Over the next year, thanks to a local policeman in a white Stetson, the villains are traced, and justice, of the most basic variety, is served. This unfolds in a very different landscape-the badlands of West Texas, where a middle-class family is forced off the road, at night, by leering hooligans, who abduct the wife and the daughter, and leave the husband stranded and tormented in the scrub. Donning a pair of spectacles slightly larger than welder’s goggles, she settles down to read, and at once we are spirited into the tale that Edward tells. (She gets a paper cut from opening it, poor soul, and her assistant has to finish the job.) Inside is the manuscript of a novel by her first husband, Edward (Jake Gyllenhaal), whom she last saw nineteen years ago, when he was still a struggling writer. Anyone whose idea of a screen marriage is the one between William Powell and Myrna Loy, in “The Thin Man,” should stay clear. The gates to their home are forged from polished steel, and a Jeff Koons balloon sculpture sits forlornly in the back yard. She lives in Los Angeles with her second husband (Armie Hammer), whom she occasionally meets at breakfast. Her makeup could have been done by a mortician. At its core is Susan (Amy Adams), a gallery owner with an austere haircut and a savage dose of insomnia.

What is the new Tom Ford movie, “Nocturnal Animals,” meant to be about? I have seen it twice now, and am none the wiser second time around.

Nocturnal animals plot