Tom Ford’s Nocturnal Animals

At this year’s Golden Globes Awards ceremony, there was a bit of an upset from the very beginning of the show when one of the first awards for film – for the Best Supporting Actor category – was won by Aaron Taylor-Johnson for his role in Nocturnal Animals over

Nocturnal Animals, Focus Features, 2016

favourites such as Mahershala Ali for Moonlight, Dev Patel for Lion, and Simon Helberg for Florence Foster Jenkins.

It came as a surprise not because Taylor-Johnson was undeserving, he actually gave a very well extracted and well thought out performance, but only because the other actors had larger parts in films that had been gathering more steam during awards season than Nocturnal Animals. This brings us to the question, as I’m certain after Taylor-Johnson’s win many others are also asking, does Tom Ford’s film deserve its place among the best films of the last year. My answer to this question would be a definite nod in the affirmative.

Tom Ford, most well known as a designer, is also a very skillful filmmaker as evidenced by his first feature film, A Single Man, from a few years ago which gained an Oscar Nomination for its lead actor, Colin Firth. There is no doubt that Ford employs much of his skills relating to design, colours and aesthetics in his films, and while this may be more prominent in A Single Man, the way these techniques are handled in Nocturnal Animals are also very important. For example, the way Susan (Amy Adams), an upper class gallery manager, appears neatly polished, well dressed and always surrounded by scenery that indicates her aloof existence in an uppity world of excess and materialism is then juxtaposed with the second storyline in the film – presented in a rural, dusty, Texas setting, the antithesis of Susan’s world – that exists in a novel, sent to her by her writer ex-husband, Edward (Jake Gyllenhaal).

Thus, we are presented with such factions of evidence to show that Tom Ford is a capable filmmaker in the way he handles the multiple narratives running through the film and the way he uses the story within the story (the story of the novel within the film that viewers are watching) in a way that allows one to comment on and develop the other.
Nocturnal Animals is a psychological thriller and the way the film works on the audience’s mind is aided, in part, by the way the film’s narratives cross and interweave with each other.

As Susan’s current marriage falls apart around her and as she tries to maintain her steely façade of normalcy, she uses her ex-husband’s novel as a tool, as both a mechanism to purge her feelings regarding her own situation and as an escapist mechanism, which places her back with her ex-husband who has written the book – as she envisions him to be the protagonist of the novel, with her lookalike as the character’s wife. In a sense, the book manages to unearth long-buried feelings and memories within Susan even as she starts to project her own thoughts, feelings and desires on to the story that she is reading.

And if that wasn’t complicated enough, Ford adds a third storyline later in the film, highlighting the relationship Susan and Edward previously shared, including the terrible thing that she did to Edward before leaving him which no doubt prompted the creation of his novel and the representations of the characters in the novel bear similarities to himself and Susan and then, furthermore, having bad things happen to their counterparts in the novel in order to not only tell the real story of Edward and Susan but also for Edward to be able to exact his vengeance in the end of the film – as insidious and subtle in real life as the vengeance in the novel is brutal and bloody – on Susan for what she did to him.

The film would not have been as good as it is if it were not for its director and screenwriter, Tom Ford. However, the same can be said for the talented group of actors (Adams, Gyllenhaal, Taylor-Johnson, Michael Shannon, Armie Hammer, Isla fisher) Ford casts in the film – every one of whom commits and gives it their all. There is not a single bad performance in Nocturnal Animals and Amy Adams, as the lead, conveys so much even when she does not have lines, with the flicker of her eyes and her facial expressions as she reads the novel. Nocturnal Animals is a great psychological thriller that comments on relationships, revenge, art, and, more specifically, art as vengeance.

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