Tom Ford’s Nocturnal Animals is a vicious burlesque show on narrative and noir, taking two stories: one diegetic and the other not and burning down the wall in between them. This is a film almost fully dependent on the richly detailed compositions of Tom Ford, and he uses his attention to detail to force the stories together in a way that is incredibly subtle enough to sneak up on the audience. The film begins with a burlesque show appropriately presenting obese characters dancing stark naked with sparklers. This makes it pretty obvious as to what’s going on. That’s actually most of what can be said of the film. It’s a disconcerting affair, one that feels fragmented and broken as it plays but mends together after careful consideration of the frames. Tom Ford puts too much work into the compositions that he places up on screen for them not to mean anything, and here they are part of making sense of the film. The best example that I can think of has to do with SPOILERS so I’m going to put that up right now. See, Nocturnal Animals is about a modern artist played by Amy Adams whose ex-husband sends her a manuscript for his new book. In said book, a protagonist representing him is traveling through West Texas with his family when a Deliverance type attack (rape and murder) befalls the family. The book’s protagonist is the only one left alive. The shot showing the dead body of the book’s protagonists daughter is a shot of her naked body laying across the screen showing her back. Later in the film, Adams calls her daughter who is shot in the exact same way lying in a bed. It is later revealed that Adams had aborted her child. Ford’s use of duplicating the daughter frame allows us to connect the two events and stories. This spells out pretty well what Nocturnal Animals does, but also why it’s so difficult to piece it together. Through the same compositional detail and technique that director Tom Ford brought to his seriously great A Single Man he lets the biting guilt of Adam's character as she reads the manuscript be shown through subtle inconsistencies representing the way that this guilt is affecting the mind of Adam’s character. Thematically it never quite gels, but it’s so impressive and competent in what it’s trying to do that I predicted after multiple viewings Nocturnal Animals will only get better and better. After one, a few things are obvious. This is an ambitious, detailed and acted to perfection film. Jake Gyllenhaal,is as usual, the most excellent actor, Amy Adams is giving a performance that could rival hers in Arrival and Michael Shannon playing a sheriff in the book’s story deserves to win a best supporting actor award. Tom Ford has burst back onto the scene with an incredibly layered, confounding piece of work. I give Nocturnal Animals a 9 out of 10.
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December 2017
CategoriesAuthorHello welcome to FilmAnalyst. My name is Stephen Tronicek, and I really like movies. This is a way to get my opinions out to people. Thank you for visiting. |