It's been 7 years since Tom Ford's directorial debut with the poised and contained A Single Man; now Tom has returned as director, producer, screenwriter and 'chief cook' of Nocturnal Animals, his adaptation of Austin Wright's novel, Tony & Susan (1993), which he optioned after reading it.
This is a fine psychological drama in the best traditions of Hitchcock, but with a contemporary feel of the revenge thriller recognisable from the likes of the Cohen brothers. Ford has taken the novel's first person narration and created a series of character and narrative arcs in order to credibly translate to the silver screen. Well, no problems there! What a remarkable realisation and a fine score too.
In the present, Susan (Amy Adams) is the beautiful glitzy owner of an LA gallery successfully curating controversial and provocative art, seemingly surrounded by all the advantages, privileges and mod cons of wealth and status. Yet not all is rosy in her personal world; indeed we see through opulent lighting, colour, make up and fashion that her situation is vacuous, overblown, overdrawn and heading towards over with her ultimate accessory, the suave philandering husband Walker (Armie Hammer). Susan is restless and unfulfilled and her life is empty. Out of the blue the eponymous manuscript of the film's title arrives with an enigmatic note and dedication from her first husband Edward (Jake Gyllenhaal). He was a romantic aspiring novelist she married when fresh out of college some 20 years before, but as she reveals to her PA, she broke away from him in a brutal parting; we are left to ponder that...
Tracking back in time with a warmer lens, Susan has a series of interwoven flashbacks remembering two young hometown Texan students, Edward and Susan randomly meeting in New York, the postgraduate beginnings of their romance, their hopes and aspirations. Susan's mother (Laura Linney) provides a deftly played cameo as the harbinger of doom, seeing them as ill matched should marriage ensue, and that Edward will be hurt in the end; reader, it ensues! That prescience and the character mirroring of daughter and mother cannot be denied. Susan loses faith and confidence in Edward as a result of which she makes some devastating life-changing choices, and we are back to the brutal parting...
Returning to the here and now, alone for the weekend Susan settles down, dons her glasses (Celine for those interested in her amazing oversized frames), and the plot of a noir thriller is revealed to us through the device of a film within a film. In the novel, Susan projects Edward into the character of the fictitious husband, Tony and imagines a look-alike version of herself (played in fact by Isla Fisher) as his wife together with a teenage daughter; the family travelling across the wild and remote desert of west Texas. A life that may have been for Susan?
Cue trouble on the dusty highway to hell as the family fall prey to a gang of tailgating feral red necks led with visceral relish by Ray (Aaron Taylor Johnson); thus beginning an unspeakable ordeal. As with the best of the noir genre, the most gripping moments come from what you don't see; leaving the imagination free to inexorably join the horrible gut-wrenching dots, and to colour blank spaces with our own thoughts. Ford recognises in his audience that the darkness of our own minds is more chillingly terrifying than he could ever have put on screen and got a 15 certificate!
As events unravel and unfold we are introduced to a laconic, dogged, Stetson wearing lawman whom in the best western tradition of the Texas Rangers faithfully pursues his man (or is that the Mounties?) and works to his own code of honour and justice; quite brilliantly played in every detail by Michael Shannon.
There is a wow of an ending and throughout it is a visual feast, the framing of this movie is sublime. Some may feel that with Ford's fashion background the style outweighs its substance, but I didn't see it that way at all. It is beguiling and, to appropriate WB Yeats 'a terrible beauty is born'. The suggestions are that this film might feature strongly come awards season. I wouldn't be at all surprised.
Go to see this and enjoy the rich and complex story but, buckle up and be strong, because it is brutal and emotional! You are in for one hell of a ride.