There is an unwholesome kind of toxic deliciousness in this film: a vodka kick of pure malice. What an audacious, uninhibited performance from Tom Ford, and such great work from Adams, Gyllenhaal, and Shannon and Linney. And there is a glorious scene with Susan and her reactionary, Martini-sipping mamma, wonderfully played by Laura Linney. There are tremendous flashbacks, triggered incongruously by the grisly crime-genre shocks, that carry Susan back to the decisions she made and unmade in her youth. The Golden Globe nominees for Best Supporting Actor in a Motion Picture are a group of four pretty good guys from Mahershala Ali’s surrogate father in Moonlight to Jeff Bridges’ dogged cop. The younger person, reaching out maliciously from the past, mocks this bland victory with memories of the idealism you have abandoned, the youthful beauty and hope you have lost and the sickening inevitability of becoming like the older generation you once despised. As an older person, you avenge the slights and reversals of struggling youth by getting rich and successful. Nocturnal Animals is also about the revenge of the past on the present and present on the past. It is Edward’s furious way of making her feel something, anything, about him. The book is about revenge and it is revenge: a cherry bomb of rage and malice lobbed into Susan’s perfect little life. Here is what happens when the weak guy decides to get tough.
Of course, the theme of revenge begins, inexorably, to emerge.
#Nocturnal animals nominations movie
It also reminded me somewhat of the truly horrible climax of Bruno Dumont’s movie Twentynine Palms. Edward is putting his ex-wife and us through an unspeakable ordeal, a little bit like Spielberg’s Duel, but perhaps closer to a European nightmare, like Michael Haneke’s Funny Games – which incidentally came out after Wright’s novel. Susan is horrified, and we feel her horror. It is a nightmarish situation that leads to a confrontation with a classic, laconic, stetson-wearing Texas lawman, tremendously played by Michael Shannon.
This is no feathery literary confection: it is a brutal west Texas crime thriller like something Jim Thompson could have written, about a family man called Tony – Susan imagines Edward, that is, Jake Gyllenhaal in the role – who takes his wife Laura ( Isla Fisher) and his daughter Helen (Ellie Bamber) on a road trip vacation across the remote desert, where they are terrorised by a feral gang led by the brutish Ray (Aaron Taylor-Johnson). Susan begins to read and Ford dramatises his manuscript right in front of us. (In Wright’s novel she is a college professor, not an art dealer, so the literary judgment was perhaps more cutting.) There is another terrible issue in their pasts, invented here by Ford. She is astonished to receive, out of the blue, the manuscript of an unpublished novel from her first husband, Edward (Jake Gyllenhaal), whom she hasn’t heard from in nearly 20 years: a sweet, sensitive boy from her Texas hometown whose heart she broke twice over: by leaving him for her wealthy second husband, and by declaring he didn’t have the right stuff to be an author – that he was insecure and weak.
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