Reviews

Nocturnal Animals, Tom Ford's film adaptation of Austin Wright's novel Tony and Susan, is a curse tale, a story of vengeful justice, its three overlapping plots each presented in disjointed narrative style. In the present-time shell plot, Susan Morrow (Amy Adams), married to handsome alpha specimen Hutton (Armie Hammer), is the principal of a glossy Los Angeles art gallery. Their superficiality is ably demonstrated by a Jeff Koons Balloon Dog on the grounds of their fabulous home high above the glittering city. But their life is on the precipice of ruin, their marriage accursed, as meaningless as her so-called art. Hutton is having an affair and is going broke, Susan medicates herself for emptiness, pain, and insomnia.

She returns home late one night from a gala showing of Venus of Willendorf burlesque dancers, both in gigantic video and as grotesque odalisques. She drives through the slick metal gate of their estate. After it closes we see a black Mercedes pull up to the gate and stop. The next morning a package arrives for her containing a manuscript, a novel written by her loser English teacher first husband, Edward (Jake Gyllenhaal), whom she had left twenty years earlier for Hutton. He has titled the work after a teasing nickname he once gave Susan, "nocturnal animal," and has dedicated it to her. And he has added a personal note: Would she like to meet? he will soon be in LA. In bed at night, in her husband's adulterous absence, Susan begins to read the novel. Now begins the slow deliverance of justice.

Edward's book, the story-within-a-story second plot, is in the tradition of Cape Fear, Straw Dogs, Death Wish, and, at least in terrain and tone, No Country for Old Men. Mild-mannered Tony Hastings (Gyllenhaal in a double role), his wife Laura (Isla Fisher) and their bratty teen-aged daughter India (Ellie Bamber) pack up their Mercedes sedan for a long night-time road trip across West Texas. They are a happy family, teasing and affectionate, the kind of family Edward and Susan might have had. But on a dark and desolate two-lane they are terrorized by three evildoers who run them off the road, humiliate Tony, abduct Laura and India in his own car, and dump him far out on the desert. In this horrific scene and its consequences we witness Tony's failure of manliness. This of course must be resolved. Justice must be realized.

This point links us to the third plot, the past. Obsessively reading Edward's manuscript arouses Susan's deepest guilt. Through flashbacks of their courtship and short-lived marriage we see her troubling memories. Susan was at first drawn to his romanticism and sensitivity. Her harridan mother (Laura Linney) mocks these very qualities, exhorting Susan to be a realist, predicting that if she marries Edward she will before long hate what she now most admires in him. Sure enough, daughter soon becomes her mother, criticizing his writing, berating his deficiencies, declaring herself now a realist, too, who demands more from life. Edward gets it: like her mother, she thinks he's weak.

We glimpse a flirtation with Hutton, then watch the painful breakup. The abandonment of her marriage, the whiff of adultery, are bad enough. But the original sin, the moral pollution, is Susan's abortion of her and Edward's child, of which he is ignorant. Her gay brother Cooper (Neil Jackson) has engineered this evil. In his car outside the clinic, the rain-spattered windshield reflecting Susan's lamentation, she wails "What have I done? I will really regret this someday." Truer than she can even imagine. In one searing tragic instant Susan tells Cooper that he always knows the right thing to do and commits her trust to him. He promises her that Edward will never find out. But we suspect his motive. And Edward does know.

As she reads, obsessively, Susan finally understands Edward's real strength, ability, and yes, his realism. Drawn to him now, she arranges a dinner meeting while her husband is across the country in a hotel with a lover. Does she seek to end her curse by reunion? To ask forgiveness and heal her hurt, to fill the hollowness of her life? But she doesn't understand until the final scene that Edward has seduced her by his fiction. Teasing her with the promise of a liaison, he has forced her to confront her infidelity, her weakness. She has been the one feeding on airy fantasies. She is now as achingly alone as he is. The final scene of the novel forces her and us into grim thoughts about the state of Edward's life.

As curse tragedy, Nocturnal Animals is pretty damned good. Here are decent people who make terrible mistakes. We pity but cannot help them. Whether or not it is a commentary on marriage, divorce, abortion, and family, I leave to others to say. But the tight control of such a complex of plots is evident throughout. Subtle recurrent motifs stitch the three stories together. Odalisques -- ugly, macabre, or beautiful -- have been mentioned. Watch for red sofas. Baths, showers, and rain tell of vain attempts to wash what can't be cleaned.