Susan (Amy Adams) cuts her finger unwrapping an unexpected package from her ex-husband Edward (Jake Gyllenhaal) containing the manuscript of his forthcoming novel. The book is dedicated “To Susan” and Edward’s accompanying note claims her as its inspiration. The blood on her finger foreshadows more to come through emotional bloodletting as well as the novel’s fictional bloodshed.
Nocturnal Animals was adapted from Austin Wright’s novel by writer-director Tom Ford, probably the only name fashion designer with a parallel career in filmmaking. The scenes of Susan’s present-day life could have been organized on a runway with glamorous precision. She lives in a walled, gated mansion of cold hard surfaces and owns a white cube art gallery displaying ostensibly transgressive installations that no one looks at during the opening (the hors d’oeuvres and conversation are better).
Susan returns home to a troubled second marriage. Her suave husband, Hutton (Armie Hammer), is often absent. He jets across the country cutting financial deals, but she has good reason to suspect infidelity. The red heat of love and lust have long since faded to an unsatisfying shade of gray. And that’s not her only worry. Her gallery may be fashionable, but overhead is high and sales are low. She’s also aware that there is something vacuous about the art game. Susan is counseled by the only interesting character in her present life, the gay raconteur Carlos (Michael Sheen), who advises, “Enjoy the absurdity of our world… Our world is a lot less painful than the real world.”
Shifting Focus
However, the visualizations of Edward’s novel thrust the film into an entirely different place. Nocturnal Animals shifts between Susan’s dispirited routine and her reading of the novel. In her imagination, the story’s protagonist, Tony (also played by Gyllenhaal), looks like her ex-husband. The novel triggers Susan’s flashbacks to the graduate school years when they were married. As he struggled to find his voice as an author, she abandoned her own search for hers. Susan traded making art for selling art and abandoned Edward for the successful Hutton, the sort of man her mother (Laura Linney) preferred, even as she denies the extent to which she resembles mom.
The pieces of the film fit together into a snug puzzle. The contemporary art world is staged as ugly and sterile; the novel is Straw Dogs violent as it describes what happens when an affluent city family in a vintage Mercedes are run off the road by muscle-car rednecks on a dark Texas highway. The wife and daughter are raped and killed, and the story plays on underclass resentment as well as the anxiety of young professional men over their manliness, defined as the ability to defend themselves and their family. The redneck gang’s sociopathic ringleader, Ray (Aaron Taylor-Johnson), taunts Tony with, “You’re too weak!” The flinty detective assigned to hunt the killers, Bobby (Michael Shannon), represents an alternative, the Old West archetype of manhood meting out rough justice in the shadows of the justice system.
Nocturnal Animals has been called neo-noir, but that loose description applies mostly to Edward’s novel. Susan’s life veers closer to Douglas Sirk’s 1950s melodramas in her awareness that the society she inhabits, and the values she holds, are empty. It’s streaming on Netflix.
