Live by Day, Survive at Night
Brimming with duplicity, Nocturnal Animals is a thriller, and at the same time a sappy romance. Unafraid to convey pure, unadulterated brutality, director Tom Ford simultaneously leaves the audience’s mouths agape and their hearts attached to the enchanting love story. Amy Adams fully personifies the opulent, yet unfulfilled Los Angeles resident. Limited in flashback sequences, Jake Gyllenhaal portrays the aspiring novelist of which Adams partly regrets leaving for the ideal, successful businessman. In both lives there exists a gaping hole caused by the other. Flowing with suspense and drama, both performances intoxicate the audience and fully capture the eternal desire to be satisfied.
As an audience, we thoroughly enjoy the idea of a book or a movie. We crave the ability to fully engross ourselves in a fictitious world and abandon the responsibilities of the ‘real’ world if only for a few moments. So rarely do these fictional creations themselves, explore the idea of a false world, and even if they do it may only be for a simple scene or two. Yet, this is exactly what Nocturnal Animals does.
Following a less than riveting opening art exposition, Susan (Adams), the exhibition’s art curator, trudges through her lavishly styled house to discover her equally meticulously styled husband making coffee. After turning down Susan’s offering of a weekend getaway, her husband stoically states he must return to New York for reasons he simply calls “business.” Mildly disappointed, Susan retreats to her bedroom, a place where she struggles to distract herself amidst a lingering battle with insomnia.
Her current distraction: a soon to be published manuscript of a novel, entitled ‘Nocturnal Animals’ mailed by her ex-husband, Edward (Gyllenhaal). After recovering from the initial shock of the gift, the ominous dedication being in her name, and a paper cut received from opening the package, Susan settles in and begins reading. Nearly half of the film consists of scenes portraying the novel’s storyline according to Susan’s interpretation.
Nocturnal Animals is a movie with three distinct storylines, all intertwined and connected. In Susan’s reality, she finds herself grappling with the slowly growing regret of leaving Edward nineteen years prior. Susan’s luxurious lifestyle begins to crumble as her second marriage unravels and her indecision with regards to the art expostion’s future gradually leads to an internal collapse. Away from her art and her disloyal husband, Susan turns to Edward’s novel. Its plot is one Susan superficially is incapable of identifying with, yet as she continues reading she realizes the story contains a deeper more sinister motive.
It’s a timeless tale of rural revenge. A mild-mannered man with pure intentions, suddenly propelled to resort to retribution to bring justice to those who brutalized his wife and daughter. In her imaginative reading of the novel, Susan inserts Edward as the protagonist, Tony, also played by Gyllenhaal. So as the film shifts back and forth between storylines, Gyllenhaal is seen playing two different men, both victims of unwanted loss. Tony, aided by a stoically shrewd lawman (Michael Shannon) with nothing to lose, tracks down his wife and daughter’s murder: a mangy, sideburn touting delinquent played by Aaron Taylor-Johnson, who breathes a sociopathic fear into every character he touches.
The film presents its third storyline in the form of Susan’s flashbacks. As her posh, pompous life disintegrates and the novel’s horrors haunt her mind, Susan reminisces upon her last memories with Edward before it all went wrong. We see college-aged Adams and Gyllenhaal, evidently in love, yet both still unsure of their life paths. Susan, ambitious and driven, must confront the wishes of her equally determined mother who adamantly implores her to find a more suitable companion. Edward, introspective and sensitive, struggles against a sea of fleeting success despite his obvious talent. It’s a romantic pitted against the realist. In a gut-wrenching confession, Susan reluctantly reveals that she must leave Edward, forcing him to think he is not, and could never be the idyllic version of a man.
Preceded by an ear-splitting gunshot or timely tirade, each time the film cuts away from the novel’s story, Susan is shown entranced with horror, typically at a loss for words as she either drops the novel or slams the book shut, stricken with terror. Each time this happens, we are reminded that the novel’s storyline isn’t actually happening. This is where Nocturnal Animals excels. These sequences forcefully entrap us within the fictitious world and despite their natural dread, we are thoroughly more fascinated with this world than our own, just as Susan is. It’s a movie avid book lovers will identify with, yet its scope is never too limited.
Nocturnal Animals begs questions such as “Why do we do what we do?” and “Are you man enough to face your demons?” Finding herself reluctantly attending a L.A. art party, Susan’s host remarks, “No one really likes what they do.” It’s a despairing comment that grossly illuminates the struggle most of the working class deals with. In the two storylines, both of Gyllenhaal’s characters attempt to combat their innate weakness and inability to fulfill the personalities of the ‘true man.’
It’s easy to quickly be swept away and overwhelmed by the film’s stunning shifts in tone and direction, its fusion of the past and present, and its depressingly pervasive loneliness. Much like its fellow 2016 counterparts, La La Land and Café Society, the film’s ending somewhat resembles the decayed carcass displaying the slowly dying embers of love. But this grotesquely failed love story only undermines the overtly monstrous ending of Edward’s novel. A story of revenge springing from solitude, Nocturnal Animals might not be the year’s ‘best’ film, but it undoubtedly seizes its viewer with its grisly suspense and elegant heartbreak.
