and how I felt about it (good and bad), although I think I may have appreciated it a tad bit more than this critic did:
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Archived from the IMDb Discussion Forums — Nocturnal Animals
SWLinPHX — 9 years ago(February 05, 2017 04:21 AM)
and how I felt about it (good and bad), although I think I may have appreciated it a tad bit more than this critic did:
Fashion designer Tom Ford made a big splash with his debut film, 2009's A Single Man. It was a gentle and introspective character study of a middle-aged gay professor determined to end his own life. It was lush, full of feeling, and anchored by a deeply humane performance from Colin Firth. In short, it is everything that his follow-up Nocturnal Animals is not.
This is a movie overflowing with vacant artifice that is mistaken for profundity. Susan (Amy Adams) is an art gallery owner and living a posh life with her second husband, Hutton Morrow (Armie Hammer). She gets an unexpected present in the mail from her ex-husband Edward Sheffield (Jake Gyllenhaal). He's sent her his newest manuscript, a departure from his usual works. It's dedicated to Susan. With Hutton away on business, and philandering with a mistress, she dives into the story. It tells the story of Tony Hastings (also Gyllenhaal) and his wife (Isla Fisher) and teen daughter (Ellie Bamber) traveling through west Texas. They run afoul of some contemptuous locals lead by the sadistic Ray (Aaron Taylor-Johnson), who kidnaps Tony's wife and daughter. Left for dead, Tony teams up with a terminally ill police officer, Bobby Andes (Michael Shannon), to hunt down Ray and make him suffer for his crimes. As Susan continues reading, she goes through a mixture of emotions trying to determine what her ex-husband is trying to communicate to her within the subtext and metaphor of his sordid story.
I grew increasingly restless with Nocturnal Animals because it failed to justify its excessive dawdling and vapid artistic pretensions. This is a movie that doesn't really know what it wants to be so it dabbles in many different genres, none of them fully convincing or worth the effort. It's a high-gloss erotic thriller, it's a gritty exploitation film, it's a morally compromised revenge thriller, and it's a subtle relationship drama amidst the upper crust of the L.A. art scene. It's none of these. It's two primary stories, neither of which justifies the amount of time spent on what amounts to so little.
The worst offender is the frame story with Susan, which amounts to watching Amy Adams read for two hours. She takes a lot of baths and showers in response (symbolism!) but most of the cutaways and time spent with Adams is to merely watch her react. It's like she's a nascent studio audience handcuffed to tell us how to feel with her reactions. Would you have known that you should feel bad during onscreen death if we didn't cut back to Susan also feeling bad and concerned? It amounts to emotional hand holding and it's grating, also because Susan is a terrible character. She's conceited and thinks she is owed better, which is why her mother successfully pressured her to dump Edward, a man well below her self-styled station in life. Her second marriage is crumbling apart and part of her sees Edward's out-of-the-blue note as a potential romantic rekindling. That's right, this is a person who reads a revenge opus that may be all about seeking cosmic vengeance against her, and she thinks to herself, "Ooo, I think he like likes me after all."
Her self-involvement is rewarded in the end but the ambiguous ending is more just missing in action. Ford's film just peters out and leaves you hanging, just like its heroine. Edward's manuscript is easily the best story and even that is only by default. It's an easier story to get involved with because of the simple story elements that naturally draw an audience in, namely a revenge fable. The initial altercation with the family and Ray's crew lasts almost a half hour. Specifically the roadside confrontation itself is a solid ten minutes and it just goes round and round, repeating its overdone sense of menace. I wasn't dreading the horror to come but more so getting impatient for it to be over. Without depth to the characters or escalating stakes and complications, it all just amounts to a Texas hillbilly repeatedly threatening a cowering family for ten solid minutes.
The vengeance in the second half of the movie is just as predictable and too drawn out. Edward schemes with Bobby Andes to take justice into his own hands, but the movie takes far too long to reach its predictable conclusion, which still manages to be so drawn out that I was screaming at the screen for the inevitable to finally happen. When the movie ended I felt a rush of relief to go along with my general sense of perplexity.
Nocturnal Animals has the illusion of highbrow art mixing with lowbrow thrillers but it lacks the substance of the former and the courage of its convictions for the latter. Ford's mercurial taste in costuming and set design shows in every moment with Susan, as the sets feel exquisitely designed and the cinematography designed to encapsulate this. It's a good-looking movie but there's not enough under the surface. It's all empty wind -
tigerfish50 — 9 years ago(February 05, 2017 07:23 AM)
On the contrary, it seems like a particularly obtuse and feeble review. It gets facts wrong, misunderstands characters and misinterprets the obese dancing women. It gets little right.
Whoever wrote it needs to go back to Critic College. -
christmastiger-16003 — 9 years ago(February 10, 2017 12:41 PM)
Personally I think this review hits the nail on the head.
The whole "hillbillies come after a family" plot was stereotypical enough without adding the revenge bit to it. The "rich, successful person isn't happy with their perfect life" didn't need to be beaten like a dead horse either. It did feel like we were being torn between 3 different genres of movies, but it didn't work all together.
I don't really feel any emotions towards the characters, probably because they didn't really go out of their way to make them likable.
The visuals and cinematography were great, everyone outside of Amy Adams did a spectacular job with their parts, but that doesn't really make up for a weak script personally.
Maybe it was just that I was expecting a lot more for as much hype as it got.