“I wanted to use Tom’s glasses, but he was really clear he didn’t want the audience to be taken out of the film, that he wasn’t making ‘a branded film’ to sell clothes-to his credit.” “They’re Celine,” laughs Nocturnal Animals’s costume designer Arianne Phillips. Seems the only luxury fashion brand not thanked on those end credits is-you got it-Tom Ford.Įven the two pairs of Tom Ford-like oversized geek-chic reading glasses Amy Adams’s high-gloss character Susan dons as she pores through her ex-husband’s new novel aren’t Tom Fords. life, the nature of love, and the meaning of art are all explicitly addressed – and maybe discussed in a pretentious conversation or two – and then just as easily dropped, as if the simple act of naming themes is enough to establish their continued relevance in the film.Chanel, Dior, Gucci, Miu Miu, Marc Jacobs-the fashion credits that roll at the end of Tom Ford’s super-stylish new thriller Nocturnal Animals reads like a list of brands any arty fashionista covets-and has-in her well-stocked closet. And another with bare bottoms.) Lofty ideas of class, thwarted ambition, the superficiality of L.A. He later pulls a similar trick with showers. (At one point, Ford alternates between shots of Edward and Susan taking baths at the same time. And the overlapping visuals are even less clever. The interplay of the three plot lines is sleek, and moves along at a solid pace, but the parallels themselves aren’t nearly as profound as they present themselves to be. Much like Susan herself, it’s all very well-funded, well put-together, and agonizingly empty. But none of the thoughtfulness, care, or compassion that was so evident in Ford’s 2009 directorial debut A Single Man is evident in this follow-up feature. Ford’s eye remains as sharp as ever, and cinematographer Seamus McGarvey stuns in all three storylines, from the straightforward neutral tones of Susan’s past to her cold, minimalistic present, to the sun-soaked Texas exteriors of Tony’s book. The talent behind the camera is equally skilled. And Michael Shannon blows all of those excellent turns away by Michael Shannon-ing his way through the novel narrative as a grizzled, wry detective who befriends the beleaguered Edward. Laura Linney destroys both audiences and her daughter’s will to live as Susan’s ice-cold, status-hungry mother. Michael Sheen and Jena Malone charm in what would have been disposable roles in less capable hands. Adams puts in an even better-than-usual performance as both a jaded middle-aged woman on the verge of a crisis and her still wide-eyed younger self. The acting is almost uniformly excellent. The problem isn’t a simple matter of quality. Left alone in her sprawling mansion when her husband leaves on a “business” trip, Susan begins to read it and quickly becomes absorbed in the narrative. It’s a manuscript for a novel called Nocturnal Animals, one that, the attached note explains, she inspired him to write. Stuck in a crumbling marriage and almost equally unfulfilled at work as a gallery owner, Susan is sleepwalking and sighing through life when she receives a package from her estranged ex-husband, Tony ( Jake Gyllenhaal). She hangs the art up and forgets about it, finding little to no deeper meaning or purpose in any of it. It’s a scene that’s supposed to cement the protagonist’s ennui-ridden struggles with the trappings of her unfulfilling one-percenter life, but it’s a sentiment that could just as easily be said about Tom Ford’s relationship with theme in his sophomore film, based on the novel by Tony and Susan by Austin Wright. The following review was originally published as part of our coverage of the 2016 Toronto International Film Festival.Īt a dinner party in the first act of Nocturnal Animals, Susan ( Amy Adams) admits that she doesn’t particularly care for the art at her gallery.
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