A chase ensues as Tony tries to get around them and then infuriates one of the drivers, who gets him off the road. Two cars are ahead of him, each in one of the two lanes, and both are cruising slowly. Tony (Gyllenhaal) is taking a long nighttime drive through West Texas with his wife, Laura (Isla Fisher) and teenage daughter, India (Ellie Bamber). It’s hard not to watch Nocturnal Animals and see a plot with the same general blueprint. Her husband, we’ll find out later, does not take it well he becomes increasingly worked up, more about the fact that someone else has had sex with his wife than anything else, until it causes the collapse of his entire family. A married woman is kidnapped and raped by a lecherous farm boy, but the woman is resourceful she manages to take the boy’s knife and guts him like a pig while he’s raping her. That novel, The World According to Bensenhaver, is excerpted at some length in Garp. In The World According to Garp, Garp’s third novel is written after his younger son dies in a car accident which, long story short, relates to an affair his wife is having. Malone stands out to me more than anyone else in that group playing Adams’ acerbic co-worker. It’s one of the choices in this movie that break us out of the narrative and put us back in our own minds, and this is not a movie that functions best when we’re wondering about how old Linney is. Linney in particular feels like a weird choice she plays Adams’ mother in one scene despite being just ten years older than Adams. Linney and Sheen do perfectly well, as do fellow one-scene folks Andrea Riseborough, and Jena Malone, but they are ornaments on the Christmas tree. They are supported by at least three people who have shared the screen with Kevin Bacon at least once: Shannon, who is almost boringly strong, as well as one-scene players Laura Linney and Michael Sheen. Nightcrawler is stunning largely because of Gyllenhaal, while Big Eyes and Arrival have benefited as much from Adams as from any other single part of either movie. Russell has been out of ideas for the past decade – but they have both hit in terribly interesting roles. Not everything for both of them has been a winner – I need to see another comeback boxer story like I need to pay twelve bucks to see that David O. We’ve come a long way from “Does it bother you that people call you ‘Retard’?” Gyllenhaal maybe they add extensions to his jaw for dramatic work now, but increasingly the clean-shaven Gyllenhaal is a threatening fellow indeed. Jake Gyllenhaal, who has been in the spotlight longer and more adorably than Adams, has reinvented himself in the past few years with some performances angling on his strength. Susan is exasperated here and there, but I found myself much more interested in the quiet way she puts on her enormous glasses, or the reconsideration of her dark lipstick, or slightly accented murmur of hers across the table in a restaurant. She has been working more and more with women whose emotional lives are firmly on the inside and break out far less frequently for others to see. Working and reinventing and remaining on top of the depth chart into a second decade is what separates the Jean Arthurs and Teresa Wrights of the world from the Bette Davises Adams, I hope, is going to get at least the second decade. Amy Adams has been starring in pictures for a little more than ten years now. It’s not merely that everyone with a name in this movie is a Good Actor, but that each of them has been cast to perfection as well. Speaking of Michael “ It’s Time for the Urn” Shannon, though, Nocturnal Animals has one of the best casts of any American movie in the past few years. Y’all were concerned about 3D movies, when the real problem was the existence of digital colorists all along. Before this movie, I did not know that I could be annoyed by every single scene Michael Shannon was in, but now I know that it’s possible. Tom Ford uses enormous color contrasts to show a difference between the Susan plot (black, gray, chrome) and the Tony plot (blue, orange, lens flare), which is more glaring than useful. The ending feels rushed on both fronts, and of course it’s Susan, who was only our gateway into feeling, who gets short shrift. At a little less than two hours, Nocturnal Animals comes in about half an hour shorter than a movie like that really ought to be. It can’t decide which part of its plot it’s most interested in and sacrifices both pieces for it. Nocturnal Animals checks off boxes for me, in the sense that it does things which typically annoy me in a movie. Starring Jake Gyllenhaal, Amy Adams, Aaron Taylor-Johnson
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |