Review of Nocturnal Animals (2016) by Ross B — 27 Jul 2017

This film tricked the critics into thinking that it's actually good, but it isn't. It starred top-notch actors, but the movie itself is so shallow and contrived. Since Mr. Tom Ford is gay person living in a gay marriage, then why doesn't he share his own experiences, instead of resorting to portray "cishet" people and their marriages in a rather tacky, Jane Austen kind of way? In this film you have the caricature of a cold-hearted classist mother, the caricature of an unfaithful husband, the caricature of an aspiring writer etc.

- all the characters are so hopelessly hackneyed and engaging in an equally hackneyed dialogue, like "When you love someone you have to be careful with it, you might never get it again" etc.

And the novel subplot (POSSIBLE SPOILERS) is even cornier. The "crime case" in it deals with a gang of hillbillies, who have this "strategy" of abducting and murdering people, dumping them in the dumpster and then waiting around for a year in honky-tonks for the sheriff to pick them up and round them up, so that then they can tell him and to the surviving victim "You got the wrong man, It wadn't me".

And the assault scene itself was unbearable to watch. Not because it was realistically depicted, by any means. I know that the Jake Gyllenhal's Sheffield character, both as the writer and the character of his own novel, represents cowardice, but in that scene Gyllenhal is not even putting up a fight, acting like the whole thing is an embarrassment for him, and not the threat on the life of his family.

No father and husband in the audience could have identified with him. Maybe that scene conveys the impression Tom Ford has regarding "cishet" fathers. In his own head, supposedly, such a father would not fight to the tooth and nail, no matter what the odds are, to protect his family from a trio of drunken rapists, who are even unarmed, but rather pussyfoot around them.

Some would say that this was the point of the whole movie, which deals with Sheffield's own fears and cowardice, but it surely fails to hit the spot when it's forced upon the audience in such a movie-phony way.

The ludicrous villains and this whole sub-plot was contrived for the purpose of the movie, which wanted to elicit the aha-moment from the audience when they realize that it serves as an allegory for the movie's "real world" within which the novel subplot is framed.

The movie's two components, the "real world" and the novel, are two equally mediocre parts of the film that do not form a satisfying whole. Instead of one good movie, you have two mediocre ones.