Tom Ford’s Nocturnal Animals accidentally becomes its own perfect critique
A perfect exercise in meta-criticism
No, this story is not popping up in your feed as part of some weird Medium backlog. I do realize that Nocturnal Animals came out over four months ago. However, I didn’t see a critique similar to the one I am about to lay out over that span, in fact most of the critics seemed to harbor positive feelings for Tom Ford’s second film.
It’s not that I truly hated Nocturnal Animals (if I truly hate a movie I usually don’t feel ginned up enough to write 1,000 words about it), it’s that I felt it was laughingly un-self-aware. (Yes, I did just have to make up a word to describe this movie.)
A bit of background for those who still haven’t seen the movie (c’mon folks, it’s been over four months…), the main character Susan (Amy Adams) is a middle-aged woman who is unhappy and unsatisfied with her hoity-toity lifestyle. We learn through a series of flashbacks that she was once a romantic, scoffing at the idea that she would one day be anything like her materialistic and vain narcissist of a mother. She marries Edward Sheffield (Jake Gyllenhaal), a fledgling writer and hopeless romantic, supposedly in an effort to demonstrate that difference. Of course, she apple-doesn’t-fall-far-from-the-tree’s him, leaving Edward for the human embodiment of white male privilege (played in this movie by Armie Hammer) and a lifestyle much more “in her class.”
(We’re going to ignore the story-within-a-story portion of the film for most of this review, as it could almost act as a separate film. While this is impressive, and one of the most redeeming qualities to the film, it still couldn’t save Ford.)
Ford’s main objective for his film seems to be to offer a scathing take down of the rich and shallow elite, especially those tied in with the high-fashion world from which Ford himself hails. In relation to the characters and plot of Nocturnal Animals, Ford has said:
“Susan is quite literally me. She’s someone who has material things but realizes — maybe this happened to me seven or eight years ago — those aren’t the things that are important. She is struggling with the world that I live in: the world of absurd rich [people], the hollowness and emptiness I perceive in our culture.”
Ford portrays this upper crust society not with respect or admiration, but with a ham-fisted “so what?”. What’s the point of the fancy ballroom gatherings if one guest abandoned the only man she ever loved? What’s the point of the showy dress if you (Susan’s sister-in-law, Alessia) are spending the rest of your life married to a closeted gay man?
“It’s all so hollow,” Ford practically shouts.
And here’s where the irony kicks in. (And the mild spoilers for those who care.) Ford has created one of the emptiest movies I have seen in years. The movie starts off so well. It is expertly acted. The work that Amy Adams does in the scene where Gyllenhaal tells her that she has “sad eyes” is the best five minute performance I’ve seen in recent memory. Aaron Taylor-Johnson gives a performance on par with Sam Rockwell in The Green Mile for its will-stick-in-your-nightmares-for-the-better-part-of-a-decade effect. Michael Shannon is the third-best actor in this movie and Gyllenhaal the fourth-best, just to give you a feel for how strong the performances are across the board.
The movie also has some well-written dialogue. Gyllenhaal’s Sheffield waxes poetics on love several times, and many of them are truly heartfelt and moving. The scene between Adams and her mother (Laura Linney) is a terrifying albeit realistic look at a trap into which many people fall.
But it’s all so empty.
The end of Nocturnal Animals leaves viewers without answers to any of the intriguing questions raised during the film: Did Susan ever have a child? If not was she delusional? Who was she speaking with on the phone? If she was actually delusional, then how much of anything that we saw from Susan can we trust? Was the entire manuscript that she receives from her ex, a good half of the movie, entirely in her own head? Why did she remove her lipstick but leave on the over-the-top dress before she went to meet her ex in the final scene?
With more than a moment to reflect, the real question that comes to mind is an ironic one: “So what?” What is Ford truly attempting to accomplish with this movie? To tell the average movie-going public that yes, he and his wealthy cohorts aren’t happy with life either? To whine about the fact that true art (in the form of Sheffield’s fictional Tony Hastings) stands no chance against the evil of materialism (in the form of Taylor-Johnson’s Ray Marcus)? Puh-lease. Those “lessons” are as sanctimonious as they are trite. If Ford truly thinks he is breaking ground (and the film has a very “I’m breaking ground” vibe to it) with those ideas he really does live in a bubble of privilege. (The only ground he does break is casting Isla Fisher to play the fictional Amy Adams role, which is as brilliant as it is hysterical.)
But after thinking about the film a bit more and reading several reviews as well as some of what Ford has said, I really believe those are the lessons Ford is trying to teach. If that is the case, it makes this movie the perfect critique of itself, a hollow movie screaming into a hollow abyss about a hollow world.
