![]() ![]() We see the sincerity of their love, but also how the worm of professional failure eats away at their relationship - exactly as Susan’s tough-broad Texas martini-swilling Republican mother, played (in a brilliant turn) by Laura Linney, predicted. ![]() The movie then intercuts what transpired 20 years ago between Susan and Edward, who grew up together in Texas and wound up in New York, where they reunited and got married. The movie says, implicitly, that he’s not Bronson or Liam Neeson - he’s you or me.Įach time the film cuts back to Adams reading the novel, we’re reminded that none of this may even have happened. On some level, the sequence is pure redneck-gothic craziness (think “Death Wish” meets “The Texas Chain Saw Massacre”), and on another level it’s an all-too-real domestic dreamscape of sexual terrorism in which Gyllenhaal, apart from his fear and loathing, is forced, at every turn, to confront that he’s too “weak” to solve this situation with the kind of heroic action we’re used to: by meeting violence with violence. The leader of the gang is Ray, played in long black sideburns by Aaron Taylor-Johnson, who gives this taunting sociopath a strange kind of depth. Inside the car are three nasty, drawling delinquent varmints, the kind we’ve seen in movies countless times before, but Ford has staged this encounter with a frighteningly existential, this is really happening bravado that keeps you riveted. She puts on her big glasses, opens the book, and starts reading, and that leads into an extended sequence of hypnotizing intensity: Gyllenhaal’s character, along with his wife and teenage daughter, are on a trip, driving through West Texas in the middle of the night (they’ve decided to do the road equivalent of a red-eye), when a car starts to pull up beside them and force them off the road. Susan has been sent the manuscript of a novel, entitled “Nocturnal Animals,” written by her ex-husband, Edward (Gyllenhaal), with whom she hasn’t spoken for 19 years. The whole setup borders on silver-spoon cliché, but then Ford leads us into another world. What’s more, their life of luxury has become a sham they are actually broke, and trying to keep up appearances as Hutton jets off to New York to prop up another deal. mansions that seems designed not to be touched by human hands, and her marriage to the distant, model-handsome Hutton (Armie Hammer), who is some sort of financial heavy, has clearly entered its ice-cold death phrase. She lives in one of those steely modernist L.A. We soon see what Susan is rebelling against. ![]() It turns out that we’re watching an art installation at the gallery owned and curated by Susan Morrow (Adams), and what it expresses, in a very extreme way, is everything our junky cosmetic culture doesn’t “allow.” It’s a rebuke to moneyed perfection. The credits sequence is an outrageous grabber: a series of heavy-set women, nearly nude, jiggling in slow motion and leering into the camera like middle-aged burlesque strippers, while music that’s voluptuous and forlorn enough to have been composed by Bernard Herrmann (the score is by Abel Korzeniowski) floods the soundtrack. “Nocturnal Animals,” too, is a movie by a born romantic - only now, the love he portrays is threatened by a scary and corrupt world. He tapped into the richness of feelings that could only be expressed underground. The Colin Firth character in “A Single Man” may have been conservative and closeted, but he was rapturously romantic - and Ford, in one of the most daring moves in modern gay cinema, portrayed that very romanticism in ways that linked it to a more repressed era. Yet there’s an organic link between them. period piece about a refined gay professor in the pre-liberation era. With Amy Adams as a posh, married, but deeply lonely Los Angeles art-gallery owner, and Jake Gyllenhaal as the novelist from her past who finds himself trapped in a nightmare, the movie has two splendid actors working at the top of their game, and more than enough refined dramatic excitement to draw awards-season audiences hungry for a movie that’s intelligent and sensual at the same time.Īt a glance, “Nocturnal Animals,” with its hot glare of sex and violence, seems like a totally different animal from “A Single Man,” which was a magic-hour L.A. “Nocturnal Animals,” which premiered today at the 73rd International Venice Film Festival, is a suspenseful and intoxicating movie - a thriller that isn’t scared to go hog-wild with violence, to dig into primal fear and rage, even as it’s constructed around a melancholy love story that circles back on itself in tricky and surprising ways. ![]()
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