Review of Nocturnal Animals (2016) by Ryan S — 09 Feb 2017

If I had to describe Nocturnal Animals in one word it would be tedious.

Personally, I had high hopes going into this one. Designer-turned-director in 2009, Tom Ford truly does have a stylized, art-house talent for making and directing movies. His first inaugural stab at film making resulted in the absolutely breathtaking, gripping A Single Man. Buoyed by superb performances from Colin Firth, Julianne Moore and Matthew Gould, A Single Man has a place in my cinematic-heart as a film I loved from an artistic viewpoint, but also from a well crafted, dramatic character narrative /direction stance.

Hence, my "high hopes" for Ford's second, follow up film Nocturnal Animals.

One thing is for sure with Ford: he loves redheads. Not only Julianne Moore in A Single Man, but also Amy Adams, Isla Fisher and Ellie Bambe in Nocturnal Animals. So big props to Ford in his casting support for fellow gingers.

Amy Adams is definitely captivating, not only in her looks but also in her acting chops here. She has had a few flops - Superman franchise; Batman vs Superman franchise; The Master. But her Susan Morrow parallels her phenomenal performances in American Hustle, The Fighter, and even Trouble With The Curve. Amy Adams is the lynch pin keeping you in your seats for the laborious 1 hour and 56 minutes that Nocturnal Animals truly is. Oh, also a bang-on cameo of Laura Linney as Susan's bourgeois, matriarchal "I don't want to be like her" mother.

On the other acting fronts, Jake Gyllenhaal is not bad, but not amazing as he was in Nightcrawler and Prisoners. He does invoke moments of Brokeback Mountain in the furry jacket scene of his Tony Hastings being broken up with by Amy's Susan's character. Jake also plays the main lead in the fictional dreamscape of Tony's literary work of dark, tragic brilliance. Which - I felt - resulted in numerous timelined back and forth character changes leaving you unsure of not only who "Tony" truly was but also what was real life versus what was literary imagination. Or it could also have been the way Nocturnal Animals edited, as - unlike the recently seen Manchester By The Sea - it left you feeling disconnected to the narrative and to the movie as a whole, to the point of not caring about what is going to happen next.

Armie Hammer is a pretty, whitewashed wasted character. Along with the completely miscast and ineffective Aaron Taylor-Johnson, as the annoying crazy ghetto redneck bandit. Michael Shannon's Detective Bobby Andes is the only character who - aside from Susan - you get semi-connected too; and only "semi" because of the adapted screenplay writing by Ford coupled with the aforementioned editing.

Ford's direction ... comes across as very one note. He uses a full-screen filming style which frames people, landscapes, skylines and weather in the continually same up-close and in your face way. With Ford utilizing only the one main direction style, his direction -along with the movie overall - becomes monotone and drawn out; resulting in a predictability and lifelessness to a story that needed to have been brought to life in a more haunting and terrorizing manner. Additionally, Ford tries again - a la A Single Man - to "designerize" and stylize every single aspect of Nocturnal Animals: from the jolting art gallery opening sequence, to the fashion, to the actual art pieces, to the hot red couch dumped in the New Mexico sandscape. Sadly in NA i,t feels too forced, too tried, too - again - predictable of Ford's filming style in A Single Man. A filming style that at the end of nearly 120 minutes, doesn't work for the narrative nor the overall story within a story structure of the film.

I will still go see Ford's next cinematic venture. But I will approach it like any yellow traffic light turning red: with caution.