Focus Featuresīut there’s a great deal of additional doubling going on. One is that there’s a lot of Gyllenhaal in this movie, which is not a bad thing - the two characters are different enough to be interesting, and Gyllenhaal’s a great performer. The decision to cast Gyllenhaal as both Edward and Tony has a couple of results. All the doubling in Nocturnal Animals winds up undermining it At its best, the result is almost too nerve-wracking to watch, even though sometimes it feels like massive overkill. The screenplay (Ford adapted the novel himself) is tense in spots, brutal in others - Ford has a talent for staring frightening things in the face with such beautiful framing that we can’t look away. In the meantime, Susan has to stop reading the book and then return to it, so her own life becomes intercut with Tony’s story, as do her memories of her relationship with Edward. Trying to figure out what happened, he starts working with the local sheriff (the ever scene-stealing Michael Shannon). But while driving a long, lonely road in west Texas, they’re run off the road for apparently no reason by a gang of hooligans, and Tony becomes separated from Laura and India.
ABOUT NOCTURNAL ANIMALS MOVIE
The movie cuts to the story within the novel: Tony (also Gyllenhaal) is embarking, along with his wife Laura ( Isla Fisher) and daughter India ( Ellie Bamber), on a road trip to a long vacation. She opens to discover the novel manuscript and starts reading. One day, she receives a package from her ex-husband Edward ( Jake Gyllenhaal), who as far as she knows never succeeded at his dreams of becoming a writer. (The beginning credits of the film, it should be said, run over an installation art piece consisting of obese women slowly and nakedly gyrating.) Everything seems to be going according to plan for her, from her careful manicure to her gorgeous home and beautiful husband.
Susan Morrow ( Amy Adams) is a contemporary art dealer with a beautiful, carefully constructed life surrounded by cutting-edge art and furnishings. Nocturnal Animals is a story within a story
Nocturnal Animals is no Single Man, but it’s definitely all Tom Ford. At times its self-indulgence borders on self-parody, but it captures the mood of the book while also doing something new with the material.
Watching someone read doesn’t seem like it would work as a movie, but Ford’s reimagining of the novel - which transposes a number of elements to fit his signature aesthetic - does succeed, on balance. It’s kind of a thriller, but the action is all internal: Susan’s thoughts, emotions, and memories, and the words on the page of the manuscript. The text of Edward’s novel-within-the-novel is reproduced in full, so we read it along with Susan, and experience her feelings about it. In the book, Susan receives a manuscript from her ex-husband Edward and reads it. Ford returned this fall with Nocturnal Animals, also based on a novel: Austin Wright’s 1993 thriller Tony and Susan, which does not, upon reading, present itself as a natural candidate for the screen.
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