Nocturnal Animals review

With his second feature “Nocturnal Animals, fashion designer Tom Ford tackles the very things that inspires great art and how the different people in our lives leave impressions that help form our creative responses. This is a lofty theme and with his adaptation of Austin Wright’s novel “Tony and Susan” Ford compares and contrasts two different genres and two different styles of visual filmmaking to comment on the formation the art and storytelling itself.

Amy Adams plays Susan Marrow, an icy and disconnected art curator who’s married to a traveling trophy husband named Hutton (Armie Hammer).  While Hutton is away on a clumsily obvious secret trip with his mistress, Susan receives a manuscript for a novel written by her ex-husband Tony Hastings (Jake Gyllenhaal). The book comes with a note about how the how the story was inspired by their turbulent history. The film then visualizes the contents of Tony’s book, in where Gyllenhaal also plays the main character of Tony’s Novel Edward Scheffeild. Edward is an easily frightened man who loses his wife and daughter to a gang of drunk rednecks after being forced off a West-Texas road after a car chase in the middle of the night. He seeks to punish these men with a rogue desert detective named Bobby Andels (Michael Shannon), a man of few words who no longer fears losing his job or his life to do the right thing.

 The film opens on an audience-testing slow-motion sequence where morbidly obese elderly women are shown dancing seductively to the movie’s melodramatic stringed score. This title sequence lingers on close-ups of sagging body parts before revealing these women are part of art exhibition curated by Adam’s dispossessed character. The mix between the grotesque the gorgeous permeates Ford’s every narrative and aesthetic choice here. The framing device about Susan rediscovering her young and complicated passion with the struggling writer of her post-college years is couched in the story to represent the ‘real-world.’ Yet the painfully stilted dialogue, the intentionally cold and bloodless performances within these scenes and the careful framing of Ford’s modern-art Los Angeles set-design presents a less relatable world than what is represented in the scenes depicting Tony’s pulpy and hyper-violent western/thriller manuscript.

With this strange juxtaposition, Ford tries to make the argument that success and wealth stifles creative expression by cutting the artists away from humanity, and in doing so, he proves his own point by constructing a film that is stifled by battling creative agendas. The two stories are supposed to be symbiotic and analogous but the movie lacks the necessary connective tissue to develop either story past their highly-stylized surfaces. Though pulpy and overly-treaded genre territory, the Coen Brothers-esq manuscript segments are far more engaging and impactful than the sterile soap-opera framing plot, which resembles the high-art sleaze of the 60s and 70s Italian filmmakers, as filtered through the steely cynicism of “Dead Ringers” era David Cronenberg. The two styles constantly trip over each other as the film cuts between them and their intended symbolic relationship reveals a disappointingly shallow connection.

“Nocturnal Animals” is filled with a lot of style and the structure of the story attacks character-motivations and themes in a challenging and indirect way. This is a laudable storytelling approach, but it fails to meet those challenges in a way that doesn’t seem overly self-conscious and ill-considered by the director. Gyllenhaal gives two great performances and Michael Shannon does what he’s made a career of doing and gives the best performance in a problematic movie.  Adams is almost denied an emotional reality so that she can act as a vessel by which the movie’s (unintentional?) misogyny is accounted for.  What makes the film all the more frustrating is that its ambitions are the cause of its own failure.

Grade: C

Originally Published in the Idaho State Journal/Dec-2016

Listen to this week's episode of Jabber and the Drone to hear more conversation about "Nocturnal Animals."

Nightcrawler review

In the wake of the media blitz surrounding the recent Ebola scares and the minute-by-minute news coverage devoted to the few cases brought over to America by health officials working in the highly affected regions of Africa, Dan Gilroy’s sleazy suspense film “Nightcrawler,” which skewers media outlets who profit on paranoia, would seem hilariously timely and ironic if it weren’t so real and unsettling.  The now-viral video segment in which Fox News’ Shepard Smith broke the journalistic fourth wall and stepped away from his network’s regular programming to reassure fear-gripped Americans that they’re okay and that the reality of the situation isn’t necessarily as bad as the news might have us believe, suggested, at least for a brief moment, a tipping point in which basic human morals outweighed the media’s weekly bottom-line.  

Though set in the microcosm of local LA reporting, “Nightcrawler,” without apology, thoroughly skewers the world of cutthroat exploitation journalism by framing its argument around tangential concerns of economic desperation and the rise of internet self-help woo-woo, wrapped in a stingy self-reflexive jab at Hollywood’s tendency to alter reality in favor of the glamour and grime of ‘reality-ness .’ In short, this is probably the smartest and most immersive thriller likely to be seen this year, despite having been released on a minimally-attended Halloween weekend.

As the uncomfortably desperate people-pleaser Louis Bloom, Jake Gyllenhaal drops a third of his usual body-mass to play the type of character we’re usually used to seeing him hunt down as a cop in films like “Zodiac” or last year’s “Prisoners.”  We follow closely as he steals, lies and manipulates his way through Los Angeles looking for low-level work, until he finally finds the job of a lifetime when he pulls over on the side of the road to investigate a car-crash and discovers a freelance video operation headed by a mustachioed Bill Paxton who’s there to capture and sell grisly footage of crime and destruction for the local nightly news. With a small amount of dishonestly earned startup capital, Bloom buys himself a digital camera and hires a criminally underpaid ‘intern’ named Rick (Riz Ahmed) and together they comb the city’s suburbs looking for valuable blood and mayhem.

Rene Russo, who, along with Gyllenhaal is nomination worthy here, plays the producer of a fledgling LA news station who strikes an exclusive deal with Bloom, so long as he keeps bringing in the gory goods, which of course only enables his troubled psychosis. Given the parable-like meta-metaphor going on here, it’s not a stretch to assume that she stands in for the sensational media as a whole; the local news, the global news, the 24 hour cable news, Hollywood, the tabloids, reality TV, and the rest of the morally neutral enterprises that bank on perpetuating negativity.  

Somewhere between the fast-talking, self-centered ice of “American Psycho’s” Patrick Bateman and Robert De Niro’s portrayal of the comically pathetic Rupert Pupkin in Scorsese’s cult masterpiece “The King of Comedy,” what makes Bloom such a fascinating and terrifying character to watch is that he’s too good at his job. While we can’t believe the depraved lengths he’s willing to go to get to the scene of the crime before his competition or the lines he’s willing cross to get the perfect shots of carnage he needs, in today’s economic circumstances, we somewhat admire his tenacity and his keen ability to rig the system, given his ability to completely disconnect from humanity.  

With Gilroy’s patient and subtly stylish direction, at times recalling the William Friedkin’s street-movies “Cruising” and “The French Connection,” we’re lulled by the darkly romantic atmosphere of the film into rooting for the character’s success, which later slaps us with our own moral convictions and creates an uneasy tension in our bellies. It’s this kind of blackly humorous, subversive cynicism that will both turn off the portion of the audience who like their movies to leave them feeling good and tickle those who appreciate razor-sharp and perversely misanthropic satire.

Grade: A

Originally published by the Idaho State Journal/Nov-2014