Cast of nocturnal animals
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#CAST OF NOCTURNAL ANIMALS MOVIE#
As flashbacks fill in the gaps of Tony and Susan’s relationship, Ford’s need to make sure we totally understand the connections between the dissolution of their relationship and the book-within-the-film’s tale of abduction, loss and revenge transforms the movie into a strangely academic exercise, and the ratio of skilfully acted anguish to actual elicited emotion is middling. Ford doesn’t have the knack for true uncanniness, and Nocturnal Animals stays safely within its carefully diagrammed metafictional conceit, never risking the sort of incoherence that often makes for truly unsettling cinema. Nocturnal Animals is far too sober to access subconscious fears or desires, at one point resorting to a Brian De Palma-ish jump scare (we’re talking Raising Cain quality here) to keep the idea of blurred binaries alive. He’s offering a knock-off, not an upgrade.
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So: once more through the looking-glass between reality and fantasy, that jagged cinematic terrain contested over the decades by Keaton, Cocteau, Deren, Lynch and Apichatpong – none of whom should lose any sleep over Ford’s incursion on the territory.
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That the pater is played by Jake Gyllenhaal – whom we also see in flashbacks as Tony – suggests that the scenario has been designed to have some personal resonance for its advance reader, whose visible disturbance at each new turn of the screw is also probably meant to be a mirror of our own clammy reactions. As Susan reads through the manuscript over the course of a lonely weekend, we see its story visualised as a lost-highway thriller in which a family driving through West Texas is menaced, run off the road and worse by a trio of redneck thugs. The severity of the project gets (unfortunately) clarified with the introduction of the second story, which is framed as the contents of a not-yet-published novel mailed to Susan by her ex-husband Tony, who includes a note suggesting they get back in touch. So far, so self-reflexive – and successfully so. For instance, when we see that Susan’s new exhibition is composed entirely of projected images of super-corpulent Middle American women go-go dancing nude – Red-White-and-Blue-Velvet – it seems as though we’re being invited to laugh at both the spectacle itself and the pretensions that would create it in the first place, whether they belong to Susan or Tom Ford or, perhaps, to the sort of audience that would see a movie like Nocturnal Animals in the first place. Nocturnal Animals opens on Susan, whose marriage to a philandering asshole ( Armie Hammer) is stuck in a luxurious rut, and whose art-world-darling status brings scarcely more pleasure – and just maybe makes her a surrogate for her writer-director, who uses these early scenes to play up all manner of culture-vulture decadence. One of these scenarios is ‘realer’ than the other. Following the book, Nocturnal Animals has a dual narrative structure in which two stories are crosscut for the bulk of the running time, with roughly equal screen time allotted to each. Its half-reverent, half-revisionist treatment of Christopher Isherwood’s 1964 novel showed an artist trying to actively think his way through his material instead of simply capitulating to it.Īustin Wright’s 1993 novel Tony & Susan is not similarly seminal stuff, but in choosing it here, Ford has actually given himself a chance to make two sophomore features in one. Tony Hastings/Edward Sheffield Jake Gyllenhaalĭistributor Universal Pictures International UK & EireĪs debuts by famous international fashionistas turned Venice-attending film directors go, A Single Man was, if not hugely promising, then at least willing to court contentiousness by making alterations to a beloved source text.